Chapter 1.

1.

I woke to a gentle caress on my cheek. It felt like my wife’s long brown hair tickling my face as she turned over in bed. I must have been dreaming of her again. Then the tickle crossed my nose on eight spindly legs and I sat up in the dark, blindly slapping at myself.

I reached for the nightstand and switched on the lamp. It was ten past four, Gardner Standard Time. I was sprawled across the tiny bottom bunk and there were three more spiders directly above me, suspended from the upper mattress. I grabbed a tissue from the box on the nightstand and squashed them. Then I looked around the room and discovered more spiders perched on the walls and ceiling and curtains. They must have come out while I was sleeping. I had to go around the room crushing them all before I felt comfortable turning off the light.

And by that point I knew falling back to sleep would be impossible. I had too many other worries on my mind: Dawn’s uncle, in the parking lot of Mom and Dad’s Restaurant, asking if I was out of my fucking mind. Maggie and Aidan’s very unlikely story about the basement apartment on Talmadge Street. The fake photo of Dawn Taggart standing on the shore of Osprey Cove. And Gwendolyn’s promise to come find me in the morning, to explain all the secrets. What was she going to tell me?

And when I’d exhausted all these new worries, I went back to revisit the classics, all my worst parenting failures. All the nights I forced Maggie to stay at the dinner table and clear her plate; all the times I grounded her for bad grades and blown curfews and chores left incomplete. I tossed and turned and wandered around this labyrinth of regret, searching for memories of happier days that would allow me to relax and fall asleep. I tried focusing on the good times—birthdays, Christmas mornings, Waffle House brunches. But my mind kept dredging up all my biggest failures, like the time I threatened to call the police on my own daughter.

Maggie must have been seventeen when it happened, because she’d just started a part-time job at Dunkin’ Donuts, serving up hot coffee and Boston Kremes. She had saved quite a bit of money and she wanted to purchase a $350 “vegan suede” jacket from one of those shady online retailers that do all their sales on Instagram, so she needed to borrow my credit card. I told her $350 was a ridiculous price for a coat without any thermal lining, and I tried to explain that “vegan suede” was just bullshit marketing speak for “fake leather.” I warned that all these glamorous social media influencers were peddling a fantasy lifestyle that no normal person could afford. But my protests fell on deaf ears. Maggie reminded me that she’d earned the money herself, and (per our family agreement) she had the right to spend it however she liked. Then she pushed a stack of wrinkled bills into my hand and dragged me over to the family computer.

I used my credit card to order the coat—size medium, free standard shipping via UPS. A week later, Maggie received an email saying that her jacket had been delivered—but when she went outside our house to collect it, there was no trace of a package. Later that night, after I got home from work, Maggie explained the problem to me and wondered aloud if our driver had brought the jacket to the wrong address. But I knew our driver personally; John “Speedy” Gonzalez had been on the job fifteen years and we both worked at the same package facility. He wasn’t going to bring any box marked SZATOWSKI to the wrong house. Speedy gave us VIP treatment and he always left our deliveries on the porch, where they’d be safe from rain and wind. The most likely explanation, I told Maggie, was that her package was stolen.

Porch pirates are a real problem in my line of work, and you’ll find them trolling residential neighborhoods all over the country. They are vast networks of thieves and scammers who shadow package cars and then snatch boxes right after we deliver them. Several times a month, I’ll suspect I’m being shadowed myself—at which point I will usually stop, pull over, and take a photo of the street behind me, making sure to capture the car and driver in the frame. That’s usually enough to deter them. Unfortunately, the pirates are a lot like cockroaches. For every one you see, there’s usually another three or four lurking around the corner, just out of sight.

Maggie was so upset by the news, she nearly started crying. But I assured her that she wasn’t completely out of luck. I wrote an email to the retailer, identifying myself as an employee of United Parcel Service and explaining the situation. Their reply included a gift code for a replacement jacket, free of charge, and this time Maggie placed the order herself. Three days later, another vegan-suede jacket arrived at my house—and Maggie was waiting on the doorstep to receive it. I thought the coat looked cheaply constructed and wouldn’t be much use in a snowstorm, but Maggie liked the style and wore it all the time.

Now, that should have been the end of it—except a few weeks later I stopped at the Sam’s Club to pick up some grass seed and bumped into one of my daughter’s friends, a girl from down the street named Priya Hattikudur. I liked Priya and thought she was a good influence on Maggie. Her parents were real estate agents and I saw their smiling faces on benches and bus shelters all over Monroe County. They seemed like smart, hardworking people with a lot of common sense.

So I was a bit surprised to see Priya wearing the same overpriced vegan-suede jacket that my daughter owned. And when I asked her about it, she said Maggie sold it to her.

“The company sent two by mistake,” she explained. “She was going to list the extra on Depop, but she let me have it for eighty bucks.”

I cannot tell you how awful I felt in this moment. If you’ve ever been disappointed by your children—deeply, seriously, profoundly disappointed—then maybe you have some inkling of what I mean. I was so shaken, I left the store without buying the grass seed. I had to go out to the parking lot and sit in my Jeep to steady my thoughts. And I pounded the empty passenger seat in frustration, striking it again and again until my fist was sore.

At dinner that night, I told Maggie about my conversation with Priya. She immediately confessed and apologized for lying. But she did it all with a sheepish grin, like she was Ferris Bueller caught playing hooky.

“You stole a jacket,” I said. “You’re a thief.”

“Not a real thief,” she said. “It’s not like I carried the jacket out of a store.”

“Yes! It’s exactly like that!”

Maggie fired off every excuse in the book. The retailer was part of a massive international conglomerate, so they wouldn’t feel the loss. The jacket was stupidly overpriced, so she deserved to have two for the price of one. And it was manufactured in Malaysia, probably by slave labor, so scamming the company was actually a kind of political statement. Maggie insisted that all her friends pulled the same kinds of tricks, that in the world of online shopping this was completely acceptable behavior.

“You used my credit card,” I reminded her. “You made me complicit in your crime. We’re talking mail fraud. Do you remember who I work for? How I put food on this table?”

My sister was joining us for dinner, so of course Tammy had to interrupt and give her two cents. She reminded me that no one else knew the truth of the situation, so there was no need to fly off the handle. And I guess that’s when I really flew off the handle, because I threat ened to report my daughter to the police. Maggie just laughed, because she knew I’d never actually do it.

“Let’s be sensible,” Tammy said, before proposing that Maggie simply return the jacket instead. But we couldn’t figure out how to do it; there was no way to get a return label without triggering an automatic refund. So in the end I forced Maggie to donate the jacket to Goodwill. She was mad at me for a month, and out of spite she refused to wear any coat for the rest of the winter; she’d venture out in a blizzard dressed in a cotton hoodie, as if I’d left her with no other choice. And I didn’t care, because back then I still had the courage of my convictions.

But these days, I’m not so sure. My three-year cold war with Maggie forced me to take a long hard look at all my parenting mistakes. I knew I’d pushed her away through a series of errors large and small—and now I needed to tread carefully if I wanted our relationship to survive. So I tried to relax and told myself everything would work out okay. Brody Taggart was clearly intoxicated. And Gwendolyn just seemed jealous of my daughter’s good fortune. Neither one of them could be trusted.

I lay in bed for a long time and never returned to sleep.