Chapter 1
Before She Had Words for It
It was late June or maybe early July — the kind of Southern heat that didn’t wait for the day to get started. The air in Wisteria Grove was already thick when Renate woke up, her nightgown clinging to her skin, the room heavy with humidity. She was eight, almost nine, and it was the first time she had ever spent a summer away from home. She didn’t know when the arrangement had been made. She didn’t remember anyone telling her she’d be here. But here she was.
The house felt awake before she was. Not loud — just aware. As if it had been listening all morning.
She woke up alone in the bed, the house already moving without her. Her grandparents, Henry and Evelyn Moreau, had been up long before she opened her eyes — she could tell by the smells drifting down the hallway. Sunday smells. Church smells. A whole rhythm she didn’t yet understand but would soon learn by heart.
When she stepped into the hallway, the air shifted — a faint rustle, though nothing had moved. Later she would wonder if she imagined it. But in that moment, it felt like the house was taking note of her.
In the kitchen, her cousins — Darius, Silas, and Trey — were already sitting at the bar, eating like they belonged there. Renate stood for a moment, unsure of the rules, unsure of her place, unsure of how to enter a room where everyone else seemed to know what to do.
Grandmother Evelyn’s breakfast was spread across the counter: grits, cheesy eggs, patty sausage, biscuits wrapped in a dish towel to keep them warm. And on the stove, a pot of collard greens simmered with a chunk of salt pork — Sunday dinner already underway before church had even begun.
Renate didn’t say anything. She got a plate from the cabinet, fixed her breakfast, poured a glass of orange juice from the fridge, and sat at the kitchen table. She remembers eating. She remembers the clatter of forks and the hum of the box fan in the window. She remembers the boys talking, though the words are gone now — blurred by time or maybe by the way she learned to disappear into herself.
Somewhere in the house, a floorboard creaked — a slow, settling sound. Ordinary. But it made her glance toward the hallway, as if someone had just stepped out of sight.
The next thing she remembers is washing up in the bathroom, getting dressed for church, and climbing into her grandfather’s Buick Electra 225. She doesn’t remember the year of the car, only the long body, the heavy doors, the way the seats swallowed her small frame.
At the church, they sat in the second pew on the right side. Her grandfather, a deacon, led hymns in a voice that carried through the small sanctuary. The congregation — including her grandmother in her Sunday hat — sang along in a slow, drawn-out drawl that felt heavy to Renate. Not joyful. Not uplifting. Something else. Something she didn’t have words for yet. Something that sounded like sadness and weight and a kind of suffering she didn’t understand.
The church ladies fanned themselves with cardboard fans — Jesus on the front, a funeral home advertisement on the back. The images frightened her, though she couldn’t explain why. Maybe it was the pairing of holiness and death. Maybe it was the reminder that both were always close.
She remembers being mesmerized by a young teen — maybe thirteen or fourteen — who played the piano like he had been born knowing how. The boy sang with the choir, his voice rising above the congregation:
“Anybody here love the Lord… I wanna know if you really, really love the Lord…”
There was call and response, the pastor shouting scripture, the congregation answering back. The sermon was loud — yellin’, hootin’, hollerin’, sweat dripping down the pastor’s face as he wiped his brow with a thin, white handkerchief. People shouted “PREACH!” and Renate felt the room swell with something she couldn’t name.
She got sleepy. She remembers her head resting on her grandmother’s lap.
She believes that was the moment her cousins turned against her.
She remembers the benediction.
She remembers her grandparents talking with church members in the yard afterward.
She doesn’t remember the ride home.
She doesn’t remember the rest of the day.
Just the heat.
The heaviness.
The beginning.