The boy before her had said “s-s,” instead of “s-c,” or maybe she wouldn’t have gotten it right; maybe she would have made that same mistake. But the state competition got her the next month. All those hard words, and then she missed parliament—left out the a—and it was strange, because both of her parents smoked that brand of cigarettes, and so her whole life that word had been right there, all around her, in every room, on every table.

“There’s a whole list here of what you spelled,” he says, and leans in close to the blurred paper. “‘Abysmal,’ ‘sepulcher,’ ‘hemorrhage,’ ‘hallelujah.’”

“Sounds horrible doesn’t it?”

“Except for ‘hallelujah.’” He pauses, never breaking eye contact. “What about ‘verisimilitude’? Ever spell that one?”

Jason is staring, his fists still clenched. She will tell him everything. She will. She will take her time and hope that someday he will forgive her, that someday he might even understand how desperate she had been.

“V-e-r-i-s-i-m-i-l-i-t-u-d-e,” she says, and perches on the edge of the chair across from him. “It’s weird how well I remember that day so clearly but I remember almost nothing about the other one you read about.” She reaches and picks up one of the pages and moves her finger along the date: 1994. “I’ve tried. They questioned me for days, and I tried.”

She is about to say more, the fragments she did recall—broken glass, the sirens, the blood, how she remembers staring at that tag—sealy posturepedic, do not remove, 658939347—and she remembers her brother calling for her, looking for her when the rest of the house was suddenly quiet, saying over and over, “It was an accident,” and the way she saw his feet there by her bed, black Converse high-tops, his name inked in blue on one rubber toe, a star on the other, and there was blood where he had stepped and made his way into her room. She could hear him breathing hard. She could hear him whisper her name, telling her he was sorry, that it was an accident, that he would never hurt her. She is about to say all of that, to begin telling the story, how that was the last time she ever saw her brother, how as soon as she found a way to leave, she did, and how nobody looked for her and she never looked back.

The back door slams, and Harvey comes running into the house and down the hall, calling for her the way he sometimes does at night when he’s afraid—“Mom, Mom, Mom!”—but then when he sees Jason, he claps and screams and jumps on the bed, with slow old Peggy right behind him. “You’re home!”