“Rachel Washington, Jake’s adoptive mother, once loved anything red. Out of fondness for the color, she planted red roses in the front yard when she and her husband, Daniel, bought their first home in Glendale back in 1969…

The plants grew more beautiful every day, releasing an intoxicating scent that she’d drink in when she’d walk to her doorstep. They were a source of comfort for her. But that was before she started hating the color red. It was only three years after planting the roses that they began to mock her rather than console her. Their petals were the exact wrong shade of crimson: deep and dark and saturated like blood.

It was 1972, and Rachel was beginning to feel defective. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, her fellow nurses told her. She needed to be patient—plenty of obstetricians in the hospital offered that kernel of wisdom. At first, she believed them, but with each passing month, she grew increasingly convinced that she was one of nature’s rejects. She didn’t understand how her body could rebel against the preeminent impulse it was programmed to obey. She felt the most acute agony she’d encountered in her twenty-six years of life, and while in the throes of her emotions, she believed that no purer form of torture existed. She was still young, but young was no longer a consolation because it had been years of trying, years of waiting for the thirtieth, the thirty-first of the month hoping nothing would show up, only to be destroyed by the color red.

She grew resentful of the brilliant hues of the roses, so she stopped watering them. She told herself that if she could rid her house of every shade of red, maybe it wouldn’t haunt her with its monthly appearances.”