The movie had disturbed him. It was not traditionally scary, was a light epic drama with comedic overtones, but the specter of the ranch house, its dark prominence, had been more than a little unsettling. Halfway through the film, the interior of the house had changed, been remodeled, and that wasn’t so bad. The lighter walls and furniture looked fake, setbound, and that had enabled him to disassociate the movie home from his own.

His father, he remembered, had loved that film.

He’d known early on that there was something different about his family. They hadn’t socialized with the other people in the extended series of adjoining ranches known as the town of Dry River, his parents keeping to themselves, associating only with his father’s assistant Billings and with the occasional old friends or relatives who visited from back east. Even when Mark had started going to school and making friends of his own, he had the impression that his parents disapproved, that they would rather he not bring any other kids home—which seemed to be fine with his friends since they were afraid of the house anyway. He’d ended up spending most of his childhood at other people’s houses, inventing a family that did not exist in the stories he told, lying and exaggerating in order to make his parents seem more normal, expanding his personal mythology to include Kristen when she’d come along.

It had been the ritualization of their lives, he supposed, that had first caused him to start thinking about moving away, the fact that his father made them eat breakfast every morning at exactly six o’clock, made them eat dinner at six each evening, made them sit in exactly the same spots each time, made them all go to bed at precisely nine o’clock, made them sit in separate rooms for an hour each night reciting their Daily Words. Other parents didn’t do that, he knew. People sometimes said prayers, ate together, but they didn’t regiment their lives to the extent that his parents did.

And they did not beat their children when some slight mistake or miscalculation made them a second or two late for one of these ritualized practices.

As his parents did.

But, still, they were his family. And there was no way that he could leave Kristen. She needed him. He took the heat that would have otherwise fallen on her. And he kept her from buying into their parents’ wackiness completely, kept her grounded as much as possible in the real world.

Then it had happened.

Even now, goose bumps popped up on his arms when he thought about it.