PREFACE

Dore told Robin the earliest stories about Nick, starting way before anything Robin’s mother had ever revealed. They were stories like confessions, spilling over, stopping only when Dore realized just whom it was she was telling her whole life to. It was all still a puzzle made up of other people’s memory, blurred outlines Robin needed to decipher, and when the final pieces came, the heart, they came much later, almost after everything else had happened, but they came from Nick himself. They were given to her like a gift, when she was lying sick across his couch up in Madison, listening only to the mad flutter of the bats trapped in the attic room above her, their crazy bangs and shufflings amplified in the stubborn stillness of the house. But by that time, she had no more reason to disbelieve anything he might say to her, and he…well, he had no more reason to lie.