In my father's house, I did what was expected as I always had. After dinner we watched two game shows and a news program where some politician spent sixty minutes trashing her opponent's agenda without offering a single alternative. Then my father turned off the lights and we all went to our rooms. Outside my bedroom door, Jake stopped and took my hand.

"Jess, are you okay? I mean—"

"I'm fine, really. Just exhausted." A half truth. Never in my life had I been more exhausted, but never had I been less fine. He let me go and I entered my bedroom and shut the door and waited. It was a full minute before his footsteps receded down the hallway. I leaned back against the door and closed my eyes.

Leave.

You can't leave. You made a promise.

No promise is worth this madness.

Faces flashed through my mind. Old Mister Summerfield staring at me in grim silence. Myrtle judging me from the lofty throne of motherhood. Misty. How did Misty fit into the puzzle? I didn't want to go further than my encounter with Misty. To distract myself I sat on the edge of my bed and brushed my hair and rubbed lotion on my skin.

My avoidance was in vain. What option was there but to lie down on the bed and turn the lights off?

You have options. You're not ten years old anymore.

I made a promise.

The low hum of anxiety running through my veins dialed upward until my hands tapped restlessly against the bed. I scanned the ceiling for cameras. Was Dan Tanner watching me? Had he ogled me in the shower? Did he know about the pastor? Did he see me wreck his car?

Was I mad?

A floorboard creaked outside my door and I froze. For a decade between the time my mother died and the time I left my father's house I listened for that sound every night. Would it be followed by the turning of my doorknob or would he go on to his own room.

A sheen of sweat broke out across my brow.

He can't hurt you now. You're not a child. Jake's not a child. He won't let anything happen to you.

But he'd lied about my purse. I don't know why or what really happened, but I knew Jake lied.

My father moved on to his own room without touching my doorknob and my heartbeat returned to it's normal rhythm. My mind returned to trying to process the last twenty-four hours. It was like trying to chew through bone.

Green neon numbers ticked forward. I'd lain in my childhood bed with its sunken mattress for sixty minutes. Two hours. Until today turned into tomorrow.

On the hazy, oft-edited movie screen of childhood memory, a much younger Jessica woke in the night, hungry and restless. Surely it wouldn't hurt anything to sneak downstairs and steal a few bites of leftovers. The child in my mind pressed her bare feet against the cold floor, stood, and waited to see if there was any consequence to come from breaking the hard-and-fast rule about staying in bed.

Nothing happened, so she tip-toed to the door and turned the handle so slowly and cautiously that a full minute passed before the door stood open wide enough for her to slip through. The hallway was darker than nightmares with the lights turned off and no windows, but when she reached the stairs, she saw, to her relief, that the glow of the yard light helped illuminate the living room.

Experience had taught her that the stairs creaked less if she kept her weight to the edges of the steps and avoided the centers.

Once downstairs, she began to feel emboldened. No one had heard her moving about, and now an entire level of the house separated her from the rest of her family. She scurried into the kitchen with steps light and quick as those of a field mouse and pulled hard on the refrigerator door. There was a moment of terror when the bottles on the inner-door shelves clanked and rattled. Frozen, she waited to hear the metallic click of a door or the heavy thud of footsteps on wood floors, but only the usual nighttime sounds of an old house groaning in the night met her ears.

Her greedy eyes scanned the shelves, passing over a Styrofoam tray of raw chicken legs and a bowl of brown eggs, a jug of milk, and a plastic container full of tomatoes. Halfway down, she found the casserole dish, still half-full and covered with clear plastic wrap. She reached for it and lifted, but a bit of grease had made one end of the dish slippery. She fumbled with it and it fell to the floor with a horrific crash. The dish cracked in two and meat and read sauce splattered across the floor onto the fridge and the fronts of the lower cabinets. Red sauce stained the hem of her white cotton nightgown.

Lights in the upstairs.

Now the footsteps came.

Pure, horrible fear filled Jessica so completely she thought she might vomit. Urine ran hot down her leg, adding shame to her panic and then her father stood in front of her with his leather belt already in his hand.

I blinked back tears. Over the years, I'd stopped allowing myself to cry for that little girl. There weren't enough tears in the world to make it right.

Giving up all pretense of trying to go to sleep I threw back the covers and sat up. Let him come for me. Things were different now. I padded across the floor in my thick, warm socks and pulled the door open. I had a vague notion of sneaking into Jake's room and swiping his phone. I'd call Aiden. His voice would anchor me to reality. Aiden lived in a world where people talked openly about the advice they'd received from their therapists and the manifestations they'd choose to put their eyes on.

Jake stood in the doorway of his room, grinning at me. He held one finger up to his lips, warning me to be quiet and motioned for me to follow him downstairs.

All of the insanity of my day vanished in a white-hot rage. I wanted to scream at him, accuse him of lying to me, of keeping secrets, of not being the brother he'd always led me to be.

I didn't do it. I kept quiet and I followed him, being careful to step toward the outside of each stair.