My eighteen-year-old daughter vanished the day I got married and left a letter saying she never wanted to see me again. It was her handwriting. It took me eleven months to understand that they were not her sentences — and by then I knew exactly who had dictated them, and what he had asked her for three weeks before the wedding.
I was a widow for nine years before I met Warrick Kess.
Lazlo died when Anouk was nine. I am not going to write about that here except to say that it took four days and that my daughter was in the house for all of them.
Warrick teaches history at Bellhurst High, on the other side of Fenmarsh. He is fifty-one. He is patient and slightly dull and he is the least alarming man I have ever been in a room with, and after nine years of being a widow in a small town that is not nothing.
We dated quietly for seven months because I was terrified of what Anouk would think.
Then I introduced them, and she surprised me.
They liked each other. He ran mock college interviews with her at my kitchen table for a fortnight, properly, with a folder and follow-up questions, and she came out of the third one and said he was better at it than the school careers woman.
