“Do you know why your brother’s blood would have been on her sofa? Did he hurt himself? Or did someone hurt him?” The thought came to Lindsay for the first time as she was thinking out loud. Had Alex been abused at the camp?

“Wow, this whole time, I guess we had at least some kind of proof about what happened.”

“About the abuse, you mean.” Lindsay tried again to sound as if she already knew the answer.

“I still can’t believe Alex did that for me. Trying to take on a grown man.”

“He was defending you,” she said, making up for the gaps. Emilia was the one who had been victimized.

“Janice was out at the softball field, coaching one of the teams. I went inside to use the bathroom. It was so hot out. I decided to take my time and enjoy some more of her air-conditioning. He came in, saying he was just checking on me, but I could tell the way he was looking at me what he wanted to do.”

Emilia wasn’t talking about her brother. She was talking about her abuser. Lindsay said nothing, waiting for Emilia to fill the silence.

“Alex must have had a bad feeling because he showed up right when . . . well, in time to stop it from actually happening. I had never seen him like that before. He charged right at us and pushed him to the ground and was just throwing punches as fast as he could, but there’s only so much a thirteen-year-old can do. I felt bad for not doing more to help him.”

“How badly was he hurt?”

“Just a black eye and a cut on his cheek, from the guy’s wedding ring.” Her voice didn’t disguise her disgust at the mention of a ring. “He told us if we said anything, no one would believe us and we’d get in trouble for lying, but my parents could see that Alex was injured.”

“So you told them,” Lindsay said.

“Not at first. I wanted Alex to say he got hit by a softball, but he didn’t want to lie. He told them what he saw when he walked into that house. I still remember the way they looked at me. I felt so guilty.”

“You were the victim. You were just a kid.”