Ree decided she would like angel hair pasta with butter and cheese. She did her parents proud by ordering in a nice clear voice and remembering to say both please and thank you. I, on the other hand, stuttered like an idiot, but managed to order scallops with wild mushroom risotto.

Jason had the veal.

The champagne arrived. The waiter made a discreet show of uncorking it with a delicate little burp. He poured two glasses in paper-thin flutes that showed off the sparkling bubbles. Ree declared it the prettiest drink she’d ever seen and wanted some.

Jason told her she could when she turned twenty-one.

She pouted at him, then returned to drowning bread in olive oil.

Jason lifted the first flute. I took the second.

“To us,” he said, “and our future happiness.”

I nodded and took an obedient sip. The bubbles tickled my nose and I thought, quite absurdly, that I was going to cry.

How well do you know the person you have married? You exchange vows, gold rings, build a home, raise a family. You sleep side by side every night, gazing upon your spouse’s naked body so often it becomes as mundane as your own. Maybe you have sex. Maybe you have felt your husband’s fingers digging into your ass, urging you closer, guiding you faster, asking you in a low guttural tone, “How do you like that? Is it good for you?” Yet this is the same man who will slip out of bed six hours from now and prepare waffles with your daughter’s favorite ruffled apron tied around his waist and perhaps even a butterfly barrette, graciously supplied by the four-year-old, clipped into his hair.

If you can marvel at his sweetness, your husband’s ability to be both your carnal lover and your daughter’s indulgent father, is it not so much of a stretch then to wonder what other roles he could play? What other parts of his personality are just waiting to be dialed into place?

All through dinner, Ree giggled and Jason smiled and I sipped champagne. I thought of my husband and his lack of family and friends. And I sipped more champagne. I remembered how easily he’d convinced me to adopt a new name when we’d moved to Boston—all to help protect me from my father, he’d claimed at the time. And I sipped more champagne. I recalled his late nights hunched over the computer. The websites he frequented that he had gone to great lengths to hide. And I thought of that photo. I finally, six months later, fixated on that lone black-and-white photo of a terrified young boy, the hairy black spider clearly visible as it crawled across the boy’s naked chest.

And I sipped more champagne.

My husband was going to kill me.