I

I want to be honest about the order of things, because everyone assumes the sex came first and the paperwork was an afterthought. It didn’t work that way. The paperwork came first, and it was very thorough, and it was entirely a lie.

Here is the lie: that Nate and I wanted a child.

Here is the truth: I wanted to watch my husband ruin a girl.

I was thirty-nine. Nate was forty-four. We’d been married fourteen years, and for eleven of those years my uterus had been a hostile foreign power — endometriosis, two laps, one tube gone and the other useless, and a specialist who said we could keep trying in the tone people use for a dog that isn’t going to make it. So we stopped. Nate was fine about it in the way men are fine about things that aren’t happening to their bodies. He bought a boat. He was fine.

But I’d been a middle school English teacher for nine years before the medical billing took over the dining room table, and I knew something about fifteen-year-olds that most people forget the moment they turn twenty. I knew that they are the most corruptible creatures on earth. I knew that they are desperate to be told what they are, and that they will become it. I knew exactly how much of a girl is just a set of instructions waiting for someone with a steady hand.

And I knew my husband.

Nate loves pussy the way other men love golf. He is not normal about it. He will spend an hour and a half down there with his eyes shut and his whole face wet, breathing through his mouth like he’s asleep, coming up only to say something filthy to it and go back down. He keeps a pair of my underwear in the console of his truck. He has, on more than one occasion, taken them out at a red light and held them under his nose like a cigar. He fucks like a man being timed. And he is very, very good at making a woman come, which he knows, and which has made him generous rather than lazy, because he’s learned that the more of them you give her the more of them you get to watch.

For fourteen years that was pointed at me. I had no complaints. But I’d started to notice something in the mirror in the mornings — that the show was getting a little long in the tooth. That we were both doing our greatest hits. That when he pushed my knees back and put his mouth on me, it was lovely and it was familiar and there was no longer any chance in it of anything being discovered.

You can’t discover a thirty-nine-year-old woman. She’s been found.

So one Sunday in March I put a folder on the table between the salt and the butter dish and said, “Read that.”

Nate read it. Then he read it again, more slowly. Then he put it down and said, “You want to foster.”

“I want to foster,” I said.

He looked at the ceiling. “Dani. A teenager. In this house.”

“In this house.”

“You’ve thought about this for what, a week?”

“Four months.” I turned my coffee cup a quarter turn. “I’ve done the training. I’ve done the home study. Mrs. Pruitt has been out twice while you were at the coast. All that’s left is the signature.”

He looked at me for a while. Nate has a good face for looking, wide and plain and slow, and he uses it the way a dog uses a stare, without any idea of the effect. “You did the home study without me.”

“You’d have said yes to whatever I said.”

“That’s true,” he admitted.

That’s the thing about my husband. He is not difficult. He is a warm, uncomplicated animal with a good job and a filthy mouth and enormous hands, and the only thing he’s ever wanted out of life is to be told what to do by somebody who’s sure. Give him a plan and he’ll carry it like a beam across his shoulders.

I gave him the plan.

Mrs. Pruitt brought the files on a Thursday and I made her a pot of the good tea, the smoked one, and sat with my knees together and asked intelligent questions about attachment disorders. Then she opened the folder and I stopped being intelligent and started being a shopper.

There were four girls. Two were sisters and couldn’t be split, which was a shame because the older one had a face like a Victorian portrait. One was sixteen and hard-looking, thick through the jaw. And then there was the last one, and she wasn’t looking at the camera, and she had a sheet of dark hair pushed back off her forehead with the heel of her hand and a small, soft, slightly open mouth, and something about the way she’d been caught mid-turn made her look like she’d just been interrupted at something.

Tessa Rowan. Fifteen. Four placements in three years. Mother deceased, father in and out of county. No siblings. Borderline grades, good conduct. The school reports called her quiet and eager to please in four separate places.

“Tess is a sweetheart,” Mrs. Pruitt said. “She’s had a rough go. She’s very undemanding.”

“I’ll take her,” I said.

“Don’t you want to—”

“No.”

Mrs. Pruitt blinked at me. “There’s an overnight first, usually, before we do a full—”

“Of course. Whatever you think best.”

She left happy. I closed the door and stood with my back against it and pressed both palms flat on the wood and let myself have it for a minute — a long, hot, guilty wave of it, the way you feel stepping onto a plane.

Because here is what I’d seen in the photograph, and what Mrs. Pruitt had seen and called sweetheart: a girl who would do as she was told.

She came on a Tuesday with a duffel bag and a plastic crate and a coat that was too heavy for April.

I’ll give you the inventory because the inventory matters and because I looked at it very carefully. She was five-two or five-three. Small hands, chewed nails. Skin that hadn’t seen much sun, pale going pink at the knuckles and the knees. She had a body that had gone and developed without telling her: full, high, heavy little breasts that pulled the front of her shirt, a soft belly, hips that had come in but hadn’t finished, and legs she didn’t know to point. Her face was the problem. It was the face from the photograph, only warmer and worse — dark brows, wide-set eyes, a small nose, and a mouth with a fullness to the lower lip that had no business on a fifteen-year-old and would get her in trouble for the rest of her life.

She stood in the hall and said, “Hi,” and then, “Thank you for having me,” like a hotel.

“Tess,” I said. “Come in out of the door.”

Nate came down the stairs at that moment, and I watched him not look at her properly, and I watched her not look at him at all, and I thought: give it a week.

He took the crate out of her hands and said something dull and kind about the room and the light in it, and she followed him up with her shoulders around her ears, and I stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened to my husband’s voice being gentle, and I felt the whole thing start.

That night, after she’d eaten half a plate of the chicken and gone to bed at nine like a child, Nate sat on the edge of the mattress with his boots off and said, “She’s tiny.”

“She’s fifteen.”

“She looks twelve from the back.”

“She’ll fill out,” I said, which is a strange thing to say about a child and not strange at all about a girl.

He lay back. “It’s going to be weird, having a kid in the house.”

“It’s going to be wonderful.”

He laughed at the ceiling. “You’re very sure.”

“I’m very sure.”

And I reached over and turned off the light, and in the dark I let my hand find his thigh, and I found him already half-hard, which he hadn’t noticed, and which I noticed, and which I filed.

I bought a notebook that week. Black cover, stitched, the kind that costs nine dollars and pretends to be a Moleskine. On the first page I wrote the date and then, because I am who I am, I made a list:

1. Clothes
2. Underwear
3. The mirror
4. Hands
5. Mouth
6. Asking

Then I sat back and looked at it and thought that a girl who has been handed around four placements in three years will not be surprised by kindness and will not trust it. But she will understand a syllabus. She’ll have had six of them a year since she was eleven. Give her a course and she’ll work for the grade.

II

I took her shopping on the second Saturday.

This was, on the surface, a mercy. Her clothes were a museum of other people’s daughters — a hoodie two sizes up, jeans with a waistband that had been worn soft by somebody else, and under them, when I got a look in the fitting room, a pair of white cotton briefs that had gone grey with washing and lost their elastic, and which had a small brown shadow at the crotch that said she’d had them a long time and had worn them for everything.

We started with the boring things. Jeans that fit. Two shirts that didn’t hang off her. A jacket. She carried the hangers and said thank you and you don’t have to and stood in front of the mirror with her hands behind her back like a soldier.

“Turn,” I said, on the fourth shirt.

She turned.

“Again. Slower.”

She turned slower, and her ears went red, and she looked at the floor instead of the mirror.

“You’re going to have to get over that,” I told her.

“Over what?”

“Being looked at.”

She nodded at the carpet. “Okay.”

Then I took her to the underwear.

The store was the cheap one, racks of it in bins, and Tess drifted along the edge of it with her hands still behind her back like she was afraid of breaking something. I pulled out three sets of plain cotton in white, grey, black, and put them in her arms, and then I went back and got three more that weren’t plain: a pale pink with a lace edge, a black with the seat cut narrow, and one in a cream that was close to nothing at all.

“Those are small,” she said.

“They’re supposed to be.”

In the fitting room she went behind the curtain and I stood outside it and listened to her undressing. The zip. The shift of denim. A pause. Then a long silence.

“Tess.”

“It’s — “ Her voice came out thin. “It’s a bit small.”

“Come out and let me see.”

She came out with her hands over the front of herself and her shoulders rolled forward, and she was right, the cream pair was small, it sat low and the lace was doing more announcing than covering and the narrow seat had gone up between her cheeks so that from the back it was mostly just her.

“Hands down,” I said.

She put her hands down.

I made myself look the way I’d look at a wall I was about to paint. I looked at the width of the elastic across her hips and the place where the cotton had gone slightly translucent over the mound and the dark thatch showing through it and the two soft creases at the tops of her thighs where the leg openings had cut in.