He knew exactly the moment she fell asleep. She started breathing in a special way. He got up very quietly and started to tiptoe. You have to be good at sneaking. Because not only did he hear the hammer and smell the acetone, he caught parts of Mom and Dad’s conversation. Mom’s part. He heard “escape route.” Dad would never say that if it weren’t super important. So the escape route had to be. Hugo snuck out into the dark then over to the cabinet beneath the sink where the hammer and the other stuff was kept, and crawled inside it. When he was sure the door was closed behind him and no sound or light could get out, he turned on the flashlight on his phone. He’d lied when Dad asked. Sometimes you have to lie. “Hugo—you didn’t pack anything but your clothes, right?” Dad had fished his cell phone out of his eldest son’s pocket. “For example, we can’t have this with us.” Dad had put the phone in a drawer. So Hugo insisted he had to go pee and Dad told him to be fast, Hugo filled his mouth with water, spat it in the toilet to make it sound like pee, and the sound of the flush was loud enough to cover him going back to his room again, pulling out the drawer, and grabbing his telephone.

Now that phone’s flashlight shone around him.

It was dirty under the sink. Old leftovers and dust balls and disgusting damp spots.

And there, in the ceiling of the cabinet, he found it—taped to the bottom of the sink. A gun. A real one. The Polish brand Dad liked—was that what he meant when he said an escape route? Hugo pulled it loose, weighed it in his hand. He held it like that for a while, aimed it at the cabinet wall, but then taped it back again—surely Dad didn’t mean Mom was supposed to start shooting people.