Brooke said nothing. She turned her focus back to Patrick. Patrick had his head down. “I apologize,” she said with too much formality. “Please go ahead.”

“They stuck us in the back of a van,” he repeated, almost, Myron thought, as though someone had backed up the teleprompter. “We drove for a long time. I don’t know how long. When we stopped, we were on a big farm someplace. There were animals. Cows, pigs, chickens. Rhys and I, we shared a bedroom in the farmhouse.”

Patrick stopped, keeping his head down. The silence was suffocating. Brooke wanted to ask something, maybe a million things, but the moment felt bubble fragile. No one moved. No one spoke. No one dared disrupt the moment.

Nancy gave her son’s arm a squeeze. Patrick gathered himself and continued.

“It was a long time ago,” he continued. “Sometimes it feels like a dream. It was nice there. On the farm. They . . . they were nice to us. We got to play a lot. We could run around. We got to feed the animals. I don’t know for how long. It might have been like that for a few weeks. It might have been like that for a few months. Sometimes I even think it might have been like that for years. I just don’t know. It’s not like me and Rhys kept track or anything.”

Again Patrick stopped. Myron looked past Patrick, out that back window into the spacious yard, all the way to the trees in the back. He tried to see it as Patrick spoke, the men breaking in here, grabbing the two boys, vanishing into that yard.

“Then one day,” Patrick said, “it changed.”

His tone was more hesitant, the words coming out in a strange, uneven flow.

“They brought men around,” Patrick said. “I . . . I was abused.”

Brooke still hadn’t moved, still hadn’t changed her expression, but it was as though Patrick’s words sped up the aging process. Nothing about Brooke changed, and yet Myron could see that she was hanging on by the most brittle of threads.

“Rhys . . . he was stronger than I was. Braver. He tried to save me. He tried . . . he wouldn’t let them do that to him. He stood up to them, Mrs. Baldwin. He fought them. He poked one guy in the eye with a pencil. Really got him good. So . . .” Patrick still couldn’t lift his eyes from the table, but he managed something like a shrug. “They killed him. They shot him in the head. They made me . . .”

Patrick’s shoulder started hitching. Myron saw a tear hit the table.

“They made me go with them to this ravine.” The monotone was gone now. Patrick’s voice was raw, struggling. “They made me watch . . .”

His mother put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “I’m right here.”

“I saw it . . . I was there . . . They just . . . just dumped his body into this ravine. Like it was nothing. Like Rhys was nothing . . .”