Chapter 1

My husband threw his first love the wedding he never gave her, in my backyard, and told me it was a birthday party.

Ninety people. A tent I paid the deposit on. She came down the steps I planted the beds along, in a white dress, on his arm, and the string trio his sister hired started up when her foot hit the grass.

"It's a party, Rennie," Grant said, without turning his head. "Don't make ninety people watch you decide it isn't."

Twenty-two years ago I got a courthouse hallway and a sandwich in the car afterward, because he said a wedding was money we didn't have.

His sister Denise had the camera. My daughter had the cake knife, because somebody put it in her hand and told her to smile, and Josie is nineteen and still does what she's told when there are strangers watching.

I stood at the edge of my own patio with a tray of glasses and let it happen for about as long as it takes to hear your own pulse four times.

Teagan Marsh moved through my yard the way you move through a room that has been arranged for you. She stopped at the beds along the south fence. She touched the top of a coneflower with two fingers, the way people do when they think a thing is decorative.

I put those in nine years ago. I have moved them twice.

"Say something nice about the flowers," Denise said to her, lifting the camera. "Rennie won't mind."

I minded.

But I did not walk out of my own yard, because the second you walk out, the yard belongs to whoever is still standing in it.

So I went in through my own back door, into my own kitchen, and I set the tray down on the counter where I have set trays down for twenty-two years. Out the window I could see the tent, and the trio, and my husband's hand at the small of another woman's back, guiding her toward the table where the cake was.

The cake had two tiers.

Nobody buys two tiers for a birthday.

I dried my hands. I found the number for the county recorder's office on my phone, and it was a Saturday, so I got the after-hours line, and I left my name and the parcel number off last year's tax notice, which I know by heart because I am the one who pays it.

"I need to know whose name is on the deed," I said. "And I need to know if anybody's applied to change that in the last year."

Through the glass, Grant lifted his own glass, and the yard went quiet for him the way it always does, and I could not hear a word of it. I watched his mouth move. I watched Teagan look at the ground and smile.

Josie came in behind me with the cake knife still in her hand and her eyes wet and furious.

"Mom," she said. "Why is everyone taking pictures of them?"