Chapter One
 
There are some stories no one wants to hear.  Some stories, once told, won’t let you go so easily.  I’m not talking about the tedious, the pointless, the disgusting: the bugs in your bag of flour; your hour on the phone with the insurance people; the unexplained blood in your urine.  I’m talking about narratives of tragedy and pathos so painful, so compelling, that they seem to catch inside you on a tiny hook you didn’t even know you’d hung.  You wish for a way to pull the story back out; you grow resentful of the very breath that pushed those words into the air. 

Stories like this have become a specialty of mine.  It wasn’t always that way; I used to try to write the kind of story everyone wanted to hear, but I soon learned what a fool’s errand that was.  I found out there are better ways to get you.  “I wish I hadn’t read it,” a woman wrote to me after she finished my last novel.  She sounded bewildered, and wistful for the time before she’d heard what I had to say.  But isn’t that the point—to write something that will last after the book has been put back on the shelf?  This is the way I like it.  Read my story, walk through those woods, and when you get to the other side, you may not even realize that you’re carrying something out that you didn’t have when you went in.  A little tick of an idea, clinging to your scalp, or hidden in a fold of skin.  Somewhere out of sight.  By the time you discover it, it’s already begun to prey on you; perhaps it’s merely gouged your flesh, or perhaps it’s already begu...