And I realize my father’s mistake: he didn’t think to break the mirrors.

I have to stop whatever is leaking out through them. Whatever is behind our reflections, whatever is imitating us in the mirrors, whatever might be able to slip into our world through them. There isn’t any other way. It must be done, and now is the time to do it, before I lose my nerve. My reflection’s dislocated jaw twists into a grin.

First I make my way to the den and find the crowbar that Donovan left. Then I do my light-footed leap around the endless halls in the endless house, twirling with my baton, finding a disused bathroom here, a full-length mirror there, shattering as I go. The shattering is lovely, and I laugh. I haven’t had such a good time with my insomnia in ages. Will they wake, I wonder? No, the house is my friend; it cushions the blows in its velvet folds of drapery. I am alone with the shattering. Even when I steal into Elizabeth’s room for her vanity, she does not wake, I am a ghost, and I give it the most delicate of taps, cracking it like a nut. Now we will not get trapped on the other side! Now we cannot fall into an infinity mirror with endless reflections of ourselves—now it will just be us!

The next morning, I allow myself to sleep in, sleeping more deeply and blackly than I can remember, and it isn’t my own nervous mind that wakes me but the sound of shouting.

“Who else would have done this?” my sister is yelling from down the hall. I creep awake to them and find my mother, teary-eyed on her knees, picking glass from the floor outside the bathroom.

“Why would I do this?” Don snaps back.

“I don’t know! Isn’t it funny, though, that everything is fine until you show up, and now all the mirrors are broken?”

“That’s some bullshit.”

Elizabeth disappears around the corner and returns with the crowbar, throwing it to the floor like Don did yesterday. I must have left it there when I finished last night. They both look at it for a moment, and I think, with some amusement, that she shouldn’t have moved it without documenting its precise location first—now it is without context.

“This is our home,” she says. “You don’t see us marching around with crowbars to destroy things!”

“What have I destroyed? I fixed your window. I’m fixing your crib. I’m fixing things here because you can’t keep them together.” He turns away from her angrily and sees me coming down the hall. “Ask your sister, then. She’s the one who broke the window.”

“Oh please, Sam didn’t do this.”

“Well I didn’t.” Don’s eyes are locked on me as I approach. “Sam?”

Without looking at me, Elizabeth snaps, “You don’t have to answer him, Sam.”

I look from one to the other with wide eyes, trying to hide the smile bursting free beneath my face. This will do it, I think. This will get rid of him. Elizabeth’s anger is glorious.