I headed inside. “Hey, honey,” my mother said, when I got to the kitchen. Dad was there too, and I said a prayer of thanks that I’d only have to have this conversation once.

“Hey,” I said. “I need to talk to you two.”

I looked at my hands while I tried to figure out how to do this. Where to start. What to ask. They were ruined, my hands. All those photo chemicals. They looked like they belonged to an eighty-year-old. I’d need to moisturize, soon, and often.

“I saw something terrible,” I said, without really putting any thought into how to say it. “I saw Mr. Barrett molesting Solomon.”

“What?” my mother yelped.

My father spoke too. “Ashley, what are you—”

“It was up in the treehouse,” I blurted. “When we were twelve. The day I fell out of the tree.”

“No,” my mother whispered, but it wasn’t the no of “I don’t believe you.” It was the no of “Please, God, no.”

They stared into each other’s eyes. Grasped each other’s hands. Their faces searching.

I knew they were trying to make sense of a world that seemed to crack open. A world they didn’t recognize.

“Ash,” my father said, but it wasn’t the Ash of “Come on, Ash, don’t be ridiculous.” It was the Ash of “Oh my god.”

“Fuck,” my father said, and clamped both his hands over his mouth. “Fuck.” Stumbled backward, leaned against the wall.

I felt the tears threaten to spill over my cheeks. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I—”

My father shook his head. Held up his hand to silence my apology.

“All these years,” he said, his voice so low it was hard to hear. “George, he—he always said that Solomon was crazy. Said he had persecution fantasies—told me that, over and over. Said he tried to hurt Connor. Implied that he had something to do with your falling out of the tree. And I believed him. I treated Solomon like a criminal.”

I remembered what Mr. Barrett had said to me, about Solomon’s mother coming from an Orthodox Jewish background. The casual, quiet anti-Semitism of it, implying: You know how those people are. How many times had he repeated that line, to the people around town? How many people had he convinced she was crazy?

“Abusers they—they discredit their victims,” Mom said, her voice barely bigger than a whisper. “Make everyone think they’re liars or—or crazy. So if they ever do ask for help, they . . .”

They won’t get any. My mother couldn’t finish.

And then my father started to cry.

I hadn’t expected this from him. I’d expected denial, him trying to tell me how his Good, Good Buddy Mr. Barrett wasn’t capable of anything so awful.

My mother took me by the arm, pulled me into a hug. Eventually my father joined in.