The following morning I heard Dad’s truck come down their driveway and turn in the gravel. I already had my bag packed, and as I came down their curved staircase with the white carpet, Mr. Warren was opening the door and shaking my father’s hand. They stood at the front of the house, looking up. Mr. Warren had a question about the wisteria, which had started to look straggly.

“Prune it this summer,” Dad said. “Cut it right back.”

My father was slightly uncomfortable making small talk with people like Mr. Warren. He was more at home working for them and giving a bit of garden advice, and it was as if Mr. Warren knew that this was the best way to talk to him, something about plants. I looked at my dad standing there, his straight posture, his clean clothes, his truck tidied before coming to the big house to collect his daughter, and I wanted to shout at him that he was better than Mr. Warren, a billion times better. I looked at Mr. Warren, who was in the same dress shirt as last night, one shirttail hanging out, and a pair of shorts, casual, slouched, and at home while my father stood, watchful, trying hard to make conversation, trying not to let me down.

I never told anyone—not Sage, not Marie, and definitely not my mother.

Outside Thomas’s window, the storm had now subsided. I flicked through a National Geographic, using a flashlight he kept beside the bed. Finally I heard the motorcycle start on the drive and take off up the road. A few minutes later Marie came up the stairs to Thomas’s room and stood beside the bed.

“Libby, what’s going on? Why are you being like this?”

“Like what? He brought back souvenirs? He’s obviously crazy, and you’re acting like he’s normal. I feel like he’s a cat bringing his kill trophies to our doorstep. What’s he done? Tony De Martino told Sage they’ve hurt him so bad he might be dead.”

“You knew?”

“Sage told me. But I only found out today what Tony said, that they’d actually beaten him up. But I heard like a week ago that Wilson knew the guy was from Pottstown and that he was bribing a gang to go there with him.”

“Why didn’t you say?”

I’d wanted to tell Marie, but I was angry with her for bringing Wilson into our lives and then deciding to go live somewhere else, leaving me with the wreckage.

“I asked you over and over to make him go away, and you wouldn’t. I thought maybe you might even know.”

“I didn’t.” Marie sat beside me on the bed. “Look, I don’t think he did something so terrible, or else he wouldn’t be showing us. He’d be scared.”