The Truth. Neil Strauss

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      Mexico City, Many Years Earlier

      “Ready for school, princess?” her father asked.

      She glanced up at him. He was wearing a dark suit and looked like a movie star. An actor. She hated it when he talked to her like that. He had no right. He was rarely around and had never taken her to school before.

      He bent down and found her hand. She let it lie limply in his, like dough in an oven. She couldn’t remember ever feeling the warmth of his hand before.

      Instead of taking her to the front door of the school, he led her to an alley alongside the building, where he met a short-haired brunette woman in a pencil skirt with high heels. He kissed her, but not the way the girl’s grandmother kissed people. They kissed like lovers in the movies.

      In the days that followed, she conducted an investigation of her father, like in the detective shows she’d seen on TV. In an evidence box underneath her bed, she collected her father’s beeper, full of messages from random women; his scheduling book, documenting appointments with them; and, finally, tape recordings her father was secretly making of her mother talking on the phone.

      When she was ready to make her case, she sat her mother down and handed her the box. The little girl was nervous, not because of the effect it would have on her mom, but because the phone recordings contained evidence that she and her brother had been prank-calling the butcher. (“Hello … do you have pig’s feet?” “Yes.” “Why don’t you wash them!” Click.)

      Her mother didn’t say a word as she went through the box. First she looked confused, then uncomfortable, and finally she started crying.

      The next day, her mother started her own investigation. In addition to discovering that her husband had several girlfriends on the side, she found out that not only had he never divorced his previous wife, but he was actually still living with her—and having more children with her. So she confronted her husband about his double life and told him it was over between them.

      That night, the little girl was woken by screaming and a loud crash from her parents’ bedroom. She ran to their door and pushed against it, but it was blocked by a broomstick. The doorknob had fallen off a few weeks back, so she looked through the hole to see what was going on.

      Her father was sitting on top of her mother, his face red and twisted as if possessed. His hands were over her mother’s mouth and nose, squeezing tightly. She struggled to breathe, her hands clawing at his. Her eyes, grotesquely enlarged, appeared to turn toward the little girl, pleading, “Help me!”

      “Please don’t kill her!” the little girl yelled between sobs as she tried to open the door. She rushed to her older brother’s room and woke him up, and he ran into the hallway and slammed his body against the door. Over and over again.

      As the door burst open, her father released his grip from her mother’s face and backed away, telling his children that they were just playing. Her mother stumbled toward her—gasping violently, her face pale blue, her eyes blood red—and the little girl grabbed her hand and ran into the bathroom with her. She locked the door, and the two of them cried together.

      The boy ran to the phone to call their mom’s brothers. They were all big men and very protective of their sister. But as the boy was yelling “Help!” into the receiver, his father tore the cord out of the wall, pulled open the window of their fourth-floor apartment, and threw the phone outside.

      Ten minutes later, the girl emerged from the bathroom. The house was completely still. She heard classical music coming from the kitchen. There, she saw her dad sitting at the table, his legs crossed gracefully. He was holding a glass of cognac, swirling it slowly, gazing at it with a look of complete peace as he breathed in the notes of the drink, the music, the night air.

      She yanked the needle off the record. “What are you doing?!” she yelled, furious, confused, terrified.

      “I’m waiting for my death to arrive,” he said calmly.

      That was the last time Ingrid saw her father.