“It wasn’t normal,” Ariel insisted. “Everything was a test, or a study, or an observation. She didn’t play catch, she threw balls to test our reflexes; we didn’t play tag, we ran time trials against each other up and down the street. When one of us cut her finger or scraped her knee, she wrapped it up in a bandage, but not before looking at it closely to see every gory detail.”

“Why didn’t the other girls say anything about this?” asked Marcus. “I asked them everything I could about Nandita—everything they could remember, everything they did together. They didn’t say anything about this.”

“I tried talking to them a few times,” said Ariel, “but they never believed me. They never saw the droppers or the clipboard, and they thought the races were just fun games.”

“You’d seen behind the curtain,” said Marcus, “so you saw everything else in a different light.”

“Exactly.”

“But . . .” Marcus paused, phrasing his next words as carefully as he could. “Is it possible—I’m not calling you a liar or anything of the kind, but isn’t it possible—that the things you saw as a tiny little girl were completely innocent, and they just made you . . . paranoid . . . and after that you started seeing something insidious where nothing of the kind was intended?”

“You think I didn’t ask myself that a hundred times a day?” asked Ariel. “A thousand times? I told myself I was crazy, that I was ungrateful, that I was making it all up, but every time I did, I saw something else that set me off again. Everything she did was some crazy, messed-up way to control us, to make us act a certain way or think a certain way or I don’t even know.”

“How can you be sure that was the purpose?”

“Because it said so right on the clipboard,” said Ariel. “It was about Madison, and it was a study of control.”

“What did it say?”

“It said ‘Madison: Control.’ Why is this so hard for you to grasp?”

Marcus shook his head. “I guess it’s just . . . so incongruous from what I saw. Did you tell anybody?”

Ariel snorted. “Have you ever seen an eight-year-old tell an adult that her mom is trying to control her?”

“But at least you tried—”

“Of course I tried,” said Ariel. “I tried everything I could think of, and if I’d known what sexual abuse was, I would have accused her of that, too—anything to get out of that house. But she wasn’t hurting any of us, and my sisters were all happy, and I was just Angry Little Ariel. Nobody believed me, and when even my sisters wouldn’t believe me, I figured maybe the control was already working, and they’d been brainwashed or mind-zapped or worse. I did the only thing I could think of: I destroyed the hothouse.”