We were still married then. It was 2008, and we bought an abandoned farmstead in the mountains of North Carolina, on the backside of Tennessee. We loved its 300-year-old trees — enormous white oaks with great gnarled arms — and my husband loved that it was off the grid.

In recent years, he’d begun subscribing to survivalist magazines, buying a generator and stocking up on food, sleeping bags and weapons. It turned out there was a whole subculture out there, people who were predicting imminent disaster and planning for social upheaval, using online chat rooms to compare their setups. For him, our farmstead was perfect, because it was far from the road, and it was hidden.

My husband was a person who felt safer with loaded guns in the house, and I was a person who felt safer without loaded guns in the house. It was becoming clear to me that only one of us was going to be able to feel safe. Unfortunately for me, I had agreed to the guns years before, when I was young. I was in love, and I didn’t yet know the way that distrust could insinuate itself into a marriage.

The farmhouse huddled at the bottom of a hollow: where the wind and the sun couldn’t reach. We beat back the foliage and poison ivy and wrested open the door, then waited for our night eyes and saw that we were in a large poplar-floored kitchen. It was an eyeful of disarray: dishes strewn across the floor, a wooden high chair on its side, a feed store calendar from 1973. We opened the fridge — I don’t know why, but we did — and it was full of food, all of it black.