Cracking the Family Codes
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This is an excerpt from Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries by Jeremy B. Jones, which will be published by Blair on September 16, 2025.
We were on the coast when my son first asked about sex. He was seven and impossibly precocious. I was thirty-seven with my pants around my ankles, changing out of a wet swimsuit in a rented house in South Carolina. In truth, he wasn’t asking about sex; he was asking about anatomy. In truth, he was pointing at my balls and saying, “Why are you bigger down there?”
Sarah, my wife and this boy’s mother, was in the bathroom, watching this unfold in the mirror like one might watch a particularly clumsy cat scale a wall. Hoping for the best.
