Chapter 1

The silence in the house was a heavy thing, heavier than usual.

It pressed down on me, just like the grief for my twelfth child.

A little girl, this time.

Michael had taken her, just like the others.

Seven boys, five girls, all gone before they saw their second day.

"She looked too much like me," Michael had said, his voice flat, eyes empty. "A bad sign."

That was his reason.

For the eleventh, a boy, it was "his cry was too weak."

The tenth, a girl, "she had an unlucky birthmark."

The ninth, "he didn't look like a fighter."

The reasons always changed, always cruel, always nonsensical.

I sat on the edge of our bed, the nursery door closed tight across the hall.

My body ached with the phantom weight of a baby no longer there.

This Michael, the one who spoke of bad signs and weak cries, he wasn't the Michael I knew.

Or, he wasn't the Michael I remembered.

My Michael, my high school sweetheart, was a hero.

I had this flash of memory, so clear, so vivid.

A terrible accident, years ago, before all this.

Screeching tires, shattering glass.

He' d thrown himself in front of me, shielding me.

He' d been hurt, badly. Life-threatening injuries, they said.

But he saved me.

That was the Michael I loved, the one whose hand I wanted to hold.

This man, who moved through our home like a shadow, who doted on me one moment and became an executioner the next, he was a stranger.

How could he be both?

The loving husband who brought me tea in the morning, who worried if I was cold.

And the monster who took our children.

The shift was seamless, terrifying.

One moment his eyes would be soft, full of the love I remembered.

The next, they' d be cold, hard, like polished stones.

My mind couldn't hold the two images together. It felt like I was breaking apart.

I tried to understand, to find a reason, any reason.

Were the babies sick? Did he see something I didn't?

I'd asked doctors, secretly, after the third, the fourth.

"Perfectly healthy pregnancies, Sarah," they'd all said. "You're healthy."

So the sickness wasn't in the babies, or in me.

The sickness was in him. Or in this life we were living.