man I’d married fifteen years ago, sat down on the wet marble floor and started to cry too, because Julian knew my whole history — he knew about the father who vanished when I was sixteen, the accident, the years my mother and I spent not knowing, the hole it left in me that fifteen years of marriage and money had never filled.
Here is the part I have to tell you, because it reframes everything about the man who ordered me to bathe a stranger.
Julian had not known. I want to be clear about that — this was not a plan, not a setup, not some secret Julian had been keeping. It was, as far as anything can be, chance. Or fate, if you believe in it, and I have come to.
But it was not entirely chance that Julian had brought Lucas home. Because Julian, unlike me, had spent
