He didn’t hit anything at first. Most monsters put on a beautiful mask in order to get into your house. They smiled politely and made you dinner, ruffling your little brother’s hair. Flynn was four at the time, and Conner and Dylan hadn’t been born yet, so Jack only had two people to take care of.

Flynn and her mother.

It was funny, though. The man seemed perfectly happy when it was just him and Jack’s mom. He only became agitated when reminded that his bright-eyed, giggling girlfriend had children. When the first plate was hurled against the wall, and shattered into pieces, Jack simply took her brother’s hand and removed him from the situation. She invented a game she would later play with Raven, scouring the neighborhood for swords and magical artifacts that might help them take down a giant. And while they never succeeded in defeating him, they kept themselves out of danger, and it was enough.

For a while.

Then came a man with lazy, drooping eyelids that could barely stay open. When he was around, Jack’s mother appeared to be in a permanent state of lethargy, draping her body across the couch or hunching over in a kitchen chair. Jack spent those months making sure her brother ate, and when the new baby came along, she learned how to change diapers and heat formula, and life went on.

One man left and another arrived. Sometimes a wall would get punched, and sometimes Jack’s mother would disappear for several nights on end, leaving Jack to care for yet another screaming baby, but none of her little brothers were bruised or broken.

She kept them safe.

Then a man arrived in a forest-green baseball cap with the lying smile of a fox. He slunk through the house on gangly limbs, tall and sinewy but not bulky. There was something incongruous about him. He didn’t seem particularly insidious, and yet Conner and Dylan started flinching in his presence. Little patterns of bruises appeared on their wrists, as if they were being grabbed when no one was watching. But the bruises faded within a couple of days, and the boys never admitted that anything was happening.

Jack couldn’t prove it.