“Do you hate me, too, Danielle? Are my sister’s failings my own?”

“Did you know? You’ve been so adamant about therapy all these years. Did my Mom tell you what he was doing?”

Slowly, Aunt Helen shook her head. Then she caught herself, a second tear trickling down, a second tear wiped away. “I didn’t know about the abuse. I suspected. Dr. Frank suspected. But, Danielle, not everything going on in your family had something to do with you.”

“I told on him. I tried to make it stop and everyone died. My mom, Johnny, Natalie. If I hadn’t said anything … if I’d just kept trying to make him happy…”

“Your father was a self-centered son of a bitch. No one could make him happy. Not Jenny, not his kids, not all the second chances Sheriff Wayne gave him. Don’t pin this on yourself.”

“It wasn’t fair, especially for Natalie and Johnny. I can hate my mom. Some nights I do. She stayed with him. Worse, she took the gun from me. If she’d let me keep it and go with plan A … So during my bad moments, I tell myself mom got what she deserved. But Natalie and Johnny—” My voice broke. I got up and paced. “They died because they poked their heads out of their rooms. And I lived because I was too scared to get out of bed. It’s not fair, and no number of passing years changes that.”

“Danielle, I don’t know exactly what happened that night. I can’t tell you who did what to whom and I won’t tell you any of it was fair. But you’re wrong about your mother. She’d had enough. The day before your father … did what he did, Jenny called me. She wanted the name of a good divorce lawyer. She planned on kicking your father out. She’d had enough.”

“What?”

My aunt hesitated, then seemed to reach some kind of decision. “She’d met someone. A good man, she told me. A good man who was willing to help her. She just needed to get her ducks in a row. Then she was going to ask your father for a divorce.”

I didn’t say anything, just stared at my aunt, stunned.

“It might be,” she continued now, “that your mother never confronted your father with your accusations. Maybe, after hearing what you had to say, she was angry enough to kick him out that night. Told him she wanted a divorce. And he …”

I could see it in my mind’s eye. The gun, which I’d carried to the bedroom, now lying on my mother’s nightstand. My mother, yelling at my drunken father to get the hell out. My father, caught off guard, enraged by my mother’s sudden defiance, seeing his own handgun, reaching for it …

Natalie, wondering about the noise. Johnny, curious about the loud pop down the hall.