Someone I know has to meet the woman who destroyed her family and is now the stepmother to her children, and put on a smiling face to do it. Her ex wants her to stop in and say hello when she comes by to pick up the kids one day, and she said she knows it’s going to be…

“So,” Jessica’s dad says as I pick up her meds and medical equipment from him. “How was the conference?” I’ve been out of town for a business meeting and he is being his usual polite self. Even at the height of our discord, when I had the butcher knife in my hand and insanity in…

“It’s going to rain today,” Jessica says. “Yes, it sure looks like it,” I agree. “I just wanted to make sure you know.” “Um, okay,” I say. I am fully capable of reading a weather forecast or looking up at the iron-gray sky and reaching the appropriate conclusion, but whatever. An hour later, I’m in…

I’m on the phone with a friend of mine who lives in New York, and she mentions that she ran into a novelist she knows who lives down the street from her—“It’s New York, after all”—and I say, “Yeah, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a writer.” Jessica is listening to me and suddenly her…