The house smelled like Sunday—roasted garlic, lemon, the faint sweetness of something Dante had wanted to try and failed at once or twice before. It should have been ordinary. It should have been the soft domestic grid that had once convinced me I had made a sensible choice. Instead, the smell of dinner was an insult that pressed into the raw place inside me, where blood and memory and shame gathered.

Dante was at the table when I walked in, his posture meeting the room the way he met the world: precise, controlled, wound-up like a violin string. He didn’t look up when I closed the door behind me. He...