The first night Shelley thought she saw someone in the house, a lean figure rushing past her door, she assured herself it was a dream caused by all of Harvey’s night-terror talk and drifted back into sleep, the sounds she heard—a knock, a sigh—attributed to the limbs of the maple tree grown too close to the house, their old Labrador retriever, Peggy, turning on her arthritic hips before slumping onto a cool patch of floor, Harvey tossing and turning in his lower bunk in anticipation of another morning he would fight going to school. All last year, every morning when she walked him the four blocks, he’d clung to her hips, hands gripping and squeezing, as he had done nearly every day of first grade; she had to pry his hands from her clothes and push him away, often not looking in his eyes so that she wouldn’t weaken.

“It’s okay,” the teacher had said, a young, clear-faced woman who didn’t even look old enough to be a teacher. She was always in front of the long brick building, ushering her charges from buses and cars and parents like Shelley into the main hallway, where they would line up and wait to walk together to their classroom. Once the other children were watching Harvey, he stood a little straighter, and then, with the teacher’s assurance that everything would be okay, he walked into the building without looking back. Shelley would spend the rest of the day taking notes in the courtroom, imagining that someday, as a grown-up, he would do that same thing, just walk away from her and never look back. Her brother had done that, and, really, she had, too. She learned early that she was treated best when not noticed—average student, average looks, invisible, and out of the way—no one wants what the average or below-average person has, and so they leave you alone, and sometimes being left alone seems the best choice.