Her husband’s custom was to recount his day to her in detail: what he’d done at the office, how much (or how little) he’d accomplished, with whom he’d had meetings or met for lunch or spoken with on the phone. There were ongoing narratives—names that had become familiar to her over the years, though she’d met only a few of her husband’s colleagues; ongoing themes of rivalry, alliances, sudden rifts, feuds, tragic developments, startling consequences. In these accounts, Allan was invariably the protagonist: the center of the narrative.

Though Abigail did not always listen closely to these accounts, she took comfort in hearing them. Impossible not to feel a wave of tenderness for the man who, through the years, from the very start of their marriage, solemnly recited to his wife the banalities of his life, as a child might recite the events of his life to his mother, secure in the knowledge that anything he did, anything he said, because it was his, would be prized by his mother if not by others.

In exchange, Abigail told her husband of her day, more briefly. For she was the wife, she had a dread of boring him.

As a young woman, indeed as a girl, Abigail had learned to shape herself to fit the expectations of others. If there was a singular narrative of her life, it had the contour of a supple, sinuous snake, ever delighting in its contortions and in the shimmering iridescent camouflage-skin that contained it.

Even as a mother! Perhaps as a mother most of all.

Crucial not to let them know. How frightened you are, how little you know. How astonished you are that they have survived.

For nothing is so flimsy-seeming as a human infant. Soft-skulled, soft-eyed, with such tiny lungs, you fear they might collapse with wailing.

“Damn!”—her car was bumping, jolting. A fierce winter had left the narrow country road in poor condition, potholed and rutted. Following a line of other vehicles, Abigail was forced to drive unnaturally slowly, gripping the steering wheel in both hands. A throbbing pain had begun at her temples, the sensation of unreality deepened.

Surely the detour would double back soon. You had to surmise that a detour describes a half rectangle around an impassable road, the object of which is to lead back to that road on the other side of the blockage. But Cold Soil Road seemed to be leading in the opposite direction from North Ridge.

Oh, where was her cell phone?—she should call Allan to tell him that she’d probably be late. But her handbag was out of reach in the back seat, where she’d carelessly tossed it.