my memory was in error. The delusion was deeper, in the core of my mind, which invented in the very moment of occurrence, then recorded the fiction.
In the month that followed, I lived the life of a lunatic. Seeing sunshine, I suspected rain. I felt a relentless desire to ask people to verify whether they were seeing what I was seeing. Is this book blue? I wanted to ask. Is that man tall?
Sometimes this skepticism took the form of uncompromising certainty: there were days when the more I doubted my own sanity, the more violently I defended my own memories, my own “truth,” as the only truth possible. Shawn was violent, dangerous, and my father was his protector. I couldn’t bear to hear any other opinion on the subject.
In those moments I searched feverishly for a reason to think myself sane. Evidence. I craved it like air. I wrote to Erin—the woman Shawn had dated before and after Sadie, who I hadn’t seen since I was sixteen. I told her what I remembered and asked her, bluntly, if I was deranged. She replied immediately that I was not. To help me trust myself, she shared her memories—of Shawn screaming at her that she was a whore. My mind snagged on that word. I had not told her that that was my word.
Erin told me another story. Once, when she had talked back to Shawn—just a little, she said, as if her manners were on trial—he’d ripped her from her house and slammed her head against a brick wall so hard she’d thought he was going to kill her. His hands locked around her throat. I was lucky, she wrote. I had screamed before he began choking me, and my grandpa heard it and stopped him in time. But I know what I saw in his eyes.
Her letter was like a handrail fixed to reality, one I could reach out and grasp when my mind began to spin. That is, until it occurred to me that she might be as crazy as I was. She was damaged, obviously, I told myself. How could I trust her account after what she’d been through? I could not give this woman credence because I, of all people, knew how crippling her psychological injuries were. So I continued searching for testimony from some other source.
Four years later, by pure chance, I would get it.
While traveling in Utah for research, I would meet a young man who would bristle at my last name.
“Westover,” he would say, his face darkening. “Any relation to Shawn?”
“My brother.”
“Well, the last time I saw your brother,” he would say, emphasizing this last word as if he were spitting on it, “he had both hands wrapped around my cousin’s neck, and he was smashing her head into a brick wall. He would have killed her, if it weren’t for my grandfather.”
And there it was. A witness. An impartial account. But by the time I heard it, I no longer needed to hear it. The fever of self-doubt had broken long ago. That’s not to say I trusted my memory absolutely, but I trusted it as much as I trusted anybody else’s, and more than some people’s.
But that was years away.
It was a sunny September afternoon when I heaved my suitcase through Harvard Yard. The colonial architecture felt foreign but also crisp and unimposing compared to the Gothic pinnacles of Cambridge. The central library, called the Widener, was the largest I had ever seen, and for a few minutes I forgot the past year and stared up at it, wonderstruck.
My room was in the graduate dorms near the law school. It was small and cavelike—dark, moist, frigid, with ashen walls and cold tiles the color of lead. I spent as little time in it as possible. The university seemed to offer a new beginning, and I intended to take it. I enrolled in every course I could squeeze into my schedule, from German idealism to the history of secularism to ethics and law. I joined a weekly study group to practice French, and another to learn knitting. The graduate school offered a free course on charcoal sketching. I had never drawn in my life but I signed up for that, too.
I began to read—Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Mill. I lost myself in the world they had lived in, the problems they had tried to solve. I became obsessed with their ideas about the family—with how a person ought to weigh their