Chapter 1

Forty-five. The age when a man is supposed to be at his steadiest, finally settled enough to enjoy the warmth of his own family.

I'd finally found solid footing in this second-tier city, scraped together a down payment, and I wanted to buy a place with an elevator and central heat for the stepfather who'd hauled cement on construction sites and sold his own blood three times to put me through my PhD.

But before I could ever press the keys to that new place into his callused hands—

a stranger in a sharp suit knocked on my door.

"Mr. Fox, please take a look at this."

A yellowed sheet of paper, its edges worn soft, was slid across the table in front of me.

The plain black characters on it cut through forty-five years of everything I'd believed, like a rusted, blunt blade.

Because the man in front of me told me: "Sir, he kept it from you. For thirty whole years."

My name is Theodore Fox. Forty-five this year, an associate researcher at the state agricultural research institute.

To outsiders, I'm the golden bird that flew out of a dirt-poor mountain village.

Crowned with a doctorate, drawing a decent enough salary.

My wife, Veronica Finch, teaches English at Third High School, our son Ethan Abbott just started eighth grade, and our life looks perfectly balanced from the outside.

But you don't understand what "you open your eyes and everyone around you is leaning on you" really means until you hit forty-five.

"Smack!"

A cracked white plastic bucket landed hard in the kitchen sink.

Brown pickle brine splashed across the white tile, giving off a sharp, over-fermented, sour reek.

"Theodore, can you please say something to that stepfather of yours! Tell him to stop mailing these rotten pickles!"

Veronica scrubbed the tile hard with a rag, snapping at me over her shoulder.

"The shipping costs more than the food! Terrible packaging, the whole thing leaked all over the parcel locker downstairs. Property management just called to chew me out, and the cleaning lady stood in the lobby taking shots at me for a solid half hour!"

I sat at our cramped dining table, staring at that dented bucket of pickles, and something dry and knotted lodged in my chest—couldn't swallow it, couldn't spit it out.

"Ronnie, the old man means well."

I stood up and quietly took the mop to clean the mess off the floor. "He knows my stomach's bad and that I love these hometown pickles. Grown in the village, no pesticides."

"Means well? Do we need his pickles in this house?"

Veronica turned around, her eyes rimmed red from years of exhaustion.

She threw the rag down on the counter.

"Theodore, you wire him three thousand a month like clockwork, and this leaking piece-of-junk bucket is how he pays you back? Ethan's advanced physics program this fall costs eight thousand, we've got fifteen years left on the mortgage, sixty-five hundred every single month!"

Her voice caught.

"I've worn this coat four years and haven't let myself replace it! We pinch every penny, month after month—can't you spare a little for your own wife and son for once? Worry a little less about back home?"

The mop froze in my hands.

Veronica wasn't cruel. She was just an ordinary middle-aged woman crushed breathless by real life.

Groceries, bills, the boy's grades, an old man's care in his final years—every one of them a mountain sitting on her shoulders.

But she didn't understand. That old man in the crumbling brick house back home, slicing cabbage bit by bit with his reading glasses on, was named Ivor Whitney.

The year I was eight, my birth father drove drunk into a river and drowned.

My mother took me and remarried the poorest man in the village, Ivor Whitney, still without a wife in his thirties.

Later, when my mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer and passed, it was Ivor, this stepfather with not a drop of shared blood, who worked as a loader in town and put me all the way through to my doctorate.

"All right. Stop fighting."

I rinsed the mop clean, head down. "I'll call him tomorrow and tell him to stop sending them. I'll pick up two side jobs next month and cover Ethan's tutoring fees."

Veronica sighed, said nothing more, turned and went into the bedroom, slamming the door shut behind her.

I looked at that bucket of pickles in the sink, unconsciously felt for my flat, empty wallet, and a deep helplessness crept up over me.