The words surprised her. She placed the tips of her fingers on them. Eileen had been nine when their father died, so Clare would have been eleven when she wrote this—almost the same age as Ryan was now. Her memory of their dad had always been hazy, more a vague remembrance of the emotions she felt whenever he was around—which wasn’t that much, she thought—but that fear, the sharp tension even the sound of his voice in the house always created, that’s what she remembered the most about their dad.

There were also the moments, highly detailed moments of horror. Her parents shouting late at night, the sound of bodies slamming into walls and the crash of furniture as it overturned. The day their mother came home and installed two locks on the inside of Clare and Eileen’s bedroom, one on the doorknob and another sliding bolt. Still in her cop uniform, she had sat on Clare’s bed and given them explicit instructions to lock the door every night from then on. No matter what they heard, they were never to unlock the door or come out if they heard their dad was home.

There was also the time at Christmas when their dad bought both Eileen and Clare matching porcelain piggy banks and then filled them with fifty dollars in quarters.

Eileen closed her sister’s childhood journal. Their father was a drug addict, heroin to be specific, but in the end he would take almost any kind of pill, powder, or injection he could get his hands on. There were pictures in their house from before, when he and her mother were younger and he was healthy—but Eileen had no real life memories of him without a gaunt and haggard complexion made terrifying by his erratic, unpredictable, and often-violent behavior when he needed money for drugs.

Clare had hoped to God it was true that their father wouldn’t come home that night from the hospital—that childhood, dredging up those sepia-colored memories, Eileen couldn’t remember if she had felt the same. She had always felt like her father was someone she had barely known; had she wished him dead as well? When he was around, he frightened her and hurt their mom. It wouldn’t surprise her if she had felt the same as Clare; she just couldn’t remember.

With the notebook in hand, Eileen stood up and scanned Clare’s study again. This was the first of Clare’s journals, but there had been many, many more, and those were just the ones Eileen knew about from their childhood together. Had Clare kept journaling all this time?