“The sight of him is a torment and she wishes again that his death will come soon, that it will be vicious and lonely, with nobody to grieve for him.”

The novel opens with Gloria the morning after the sexual assault. It’s Sunday, just a few minutes past dawn. Dawn is traditionally associated with new beginnings. In the wake of the attack, Gloria has left her childhood behind. Her sexuality had been a tease. Now she understands the implications of sexuality when violence and control corrupt it. Her first response is to strike back, to wish her attacker dead. However, this is the logic of her assailant. The novel eventually shows her that this response won’t sustain her into a promising adulthood.

“How strange it was to be thinking of poems now, when I had not given them so much as a passing thought all these years since I had become a grown woman, a wife and mother, but now I recalled: This is the Hour of Lead—Remember, if outlived.”

The quote from which Mary Rose draws her guidance comes down to that terrifying word “if.” Mary Rose impulsively responds to the presence of the beaten Gloria at her front door with maternal compassion and empathy. She draws on her brief background in school—having left high school when she got pregnant with Aimee—and recalls the devastating emotional moment that Emily Dickinson writes about in Poem 372, when a person has undergone such a trauma that survival itself seems in doubt.

“If you really want to know, Corrine would gladly explain to anybody who cared to ask, I am not a drunk, I’m just drinking all the time. There is a world of difference between the two.”

Corrine begins the novel a newly widowed woman, after her husband’s suicide. Initially her response is to sit quietly in her house and slip into an alcohol-induced haze.