It’s tempting to say, looking back, that it began with that warped wall—the wall in the basement garage which had been flat and firm when I’d first bought the house but had morphed into something misshapen and hideous. But in truth, it started with her voice, Mia’s, a voice I would fall in love with—although, at the time, it existed only in my mind—a voice that had captivated me from the very first moment I heard it.
That would have been March 5, 2019, the day after they’d begun digging for the pool, when I’d taken to the deformed wall (which had been water damaged, I presumed, and was not part of the concrete foundation anyway) with a pickax—hacking away at it mercilessly until both the sheet rock and studs (which had been corrupted, as well) lay in ruins, and I was sitting on an inverte
