I should tell you how I got there, because nothing about what happened at that farmhouse can be understood unless you know the kind of life I thought I had been living before George died.
My name is Amanda Pierce. I was forty-two years old when the state trooper came to my apartment door on a rainy Tuesday at exactly 4:17 in the afternoon. I remember the time because I had just come home from the hardware store where I worked as a bookkeeper, and I hadn’t even taken off my coat yet. The groceries I had picked up on the way home were still in one arm. Milk. Eggs. Green beans. A rotisserie chicken because George liked dark meat and always stole the drumstick before I could get the plate on the table.
The officer asked if I was Amanda Pierce, and the look on his face told me before he opened his mouth that the world I knew was already gone.
George’s car had gone off the road near Morfield Pass.
He died instantly.
That was what they said.
I remember nodding as though I understood the sentence. I remember hearing my own voice ask some small mechanical question about where the body had been taken. I remember setting the grocery bag on the floor and watching the milk tip sideways against the carton of eggs. I remember the officer saying he was sorry, and I remember thinking with absurd clarity that men in uniform must practice saying those two words in some training somewhere, because he said them without hesitation and without losing the solemn expression that told me he had already seen what I was going to spend the next month trying not to imagine.
George and I had been married for fifteen years.
We did not have children. We had talked about them once in the beginning, then less often, then not at all. Life settled around us before either of us quite noticed. We were not unhappy, not in the dramatic way people mean when they talk about broken marriages. We were steady. Predictable. We ate dinner together most nights unless George was “at the farm.” We watched old crime shows on weeknights and movies on Saturdays. We knew what the other one would order at every restaurant in town. He took two sugars in his coffee, never one, never three. I slept on my left side. He liked the windows cracked even in winter because he said stale air gave him headaches.
I thought I knew him.
That is the humiliating part I still have to admit even now: I thought I knew him completely.