Their father roared and grabbed Johnny by the throat and shoved him against the same wall and told him to shut up, too, or he would “beat the hell out of him.” Tilly screamed. “Let him go! Let him go! Daddy! Stop, he can’t breathe!”

They moved the next morning and left Idaho. Tilly remembered that her father told a neighbor, an elderly man they passed on the way out of town, that the “whole family is moving,” which was strange because he had told her that her mother had left them. Maybe he was embarrassed that his wife had left him, she thought, initially. . . .

And now, with Kate, her patient therapist, Tilly finally allowed herself to think about her loving mother, how Gabriella never would have left them . . . and what the dirt on her father’s boots meant.

Tilly had never read Johnny and Betsy’s trial transcripts, but she read them now. That was the last piece of the puzzle. The therapist said, “What are you going to do now?”

Tilly told her.

The therapist nodded at her. “I was hoping you would say that.”

* * *

Tilly was working hard in high school, dreaming of going to college, and she had a job at an ice-cream parlor.

With money from that job, and three hundred dollars from her foster parents, she flew to her old home in Idaho. After she landed, she took a bus and then hitchhiked. Their old home, out in the country, off a dirt road, no neighbors around, stood tilting. Abandoned. A lazy raccoon and an alarmed possum darted out when she stepped into the entry.

The house was dark, shabby, rickety. Yet the curtains with the embroidered Mexican flowers her mom had sewn were still there. She would wash them and use them herself. She picked up some of her mother’s other things that had not been stolen: two flowered aprons; one tablecloth with red tulips, and one with a Mexican village; several mugs and her favorite teapot painted with a Mexican family. She took a few of her mother’s colorful Mexican-style shirts and skirts that still hung in the closet like ghosts.

Tilly, her hands shaking, found her mother’s faux pearl alarm clock under the bed, two red-framed photos of cats they had owned before her father had killed them, and her mother’s colorful silk scarves, one of which her father wound tightly around her mother’s neck one rainy night. She decided to leave that one at the house.

She found a black garbage bag for her mother’s treasures, then grabbed two dolls she hadn’t had time to take when they left. She looked through a collection of children’s books her mother had bought her. Some were too moldy to keep, but she managed to salvage five.