“Religion?” Nick had asked incredulously. “Nothing that’s going on here is going to earn any of us a seat in heaven.”

There had been a slight pause in the conversation before I heard Travis’s low voice float through the house again. “Heaven is a corner office and a seven-figure salary,” he had said. “And you don’t get there through good works. You chose this church and now you have to live by its rules. You need to obey. I’m telling you now, Nick, any other path will lead you quickly to hell. And that’s not a metaphor.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you’re going to hell and if you don’t play ball, someone will send you there before you can even say the words ‘whistle blower.’ ”

The words had sounded so silly and foreign to me. Companies didn’t have religions . . . did they? And how could heaven be an office? And what the hell was a whistle blower? I had imagined a high school PE coach with devil horns blowing his whistle at all the young sinners he hoped to send to hell while on the other side of the gymnasium a heavenly angel sat at a desk studying some business papers. The whole thing made me giggle . . . which is what brought Travis into the dining room: he had heard me. I remember the look of alarm when he entered the dining room and the calm that had washed over his face when he saw that the person in the room was only a child. “A little young for you, isn’t she, Nick?” he had asked as he turned his back to me.

Nick, who was now in the doorway, had flushed. “I’m—”

“Fucking her mother?” Travis had finished for him.

I remember how white Nick became upon hearing those words. It was a silent but damning confirmation of Travis’s accusations. And I remember my heart dropping to the floor.

I hadn’t known. Until that moment I hadn’t grasped what was going on—right under my nose—between Nick and my mother. Travis had barely looked at me, wouldn’t even recognize me later, and yet with those three words he had stripped me of a protective layer of innocence.

If Travis hadn’t said that last part, I might not have been able to recall the rest of the conversation at all. It would have been just a jumble of silly words I didn’t fully understand and I would have tossed out the memory before I even reached seventh grade.

But he did say it, and so I do remember that conversation vividly. And now that I’m older I see that conversation differently, because now I know what a whistle blower is.

More importantly, I know what a death threat is.