Logan is asleep, but he’ll be awake soon. My parents are getting louder every second this argument continues. They start off whispering, then talking, and then, eventually, they don’t care who hears. If the woman next door wasn’t so deaf, I’d worry, but she’s the perfect neighbor. We only have to look like nice people. It doesn’t matter what comes out of our mouths.

“It’s too late for that,” Mum says. “He doesn’t even remember what happened.”

“Of course he does. You just force the truth out of every conversation. We all remember.”

Dad looks at me, and I’m praying he doesn’t ask me to speak. We do all remember. How could we not? But that doesn’t mean I want to talk about it. Not with my angry, grief-stricken, fucked-up mother who has built a wall around our past.

Mum sighs and sits down, but she’s not calm. She’s recharging her anger, and we all know it.

She never used to be angry. She absorbed whatever Will and I threw at her and smiled like it was no big deal. That didn’t mean she was a pushover. The quieter she got, the more trouble we knew we were in. But, now, her rage is like fire on her skin. It flickers constantly and roars whenever she’s provoked. I don’t think one thing changed her. I think it was everything—the lies and the deceit and the grief and the truth she can never bury deep enough.

“I’ve told you what would happen if you betrayed us,” Mum says, and Dad stands over her, looking almost brave.

“You betrayed us, Jane,” he whispers. “You made our daughter complicit.”

She laughs like, “Ha,” and says, “Complicit? She let him die. She walked away from him. She’s only here because I saved her.”

I look at Dad, hoping he’ll defend me, but he just looks broken.

I flash back to my training and all the kids I approached and all the lines I learned in case I was caught. She didn’t save me. She used me.

Mum isn’t the only angry one in this house. I have anger, too, and I feel it rumbling deep inside. I don’t wear it like she does, but what if I let it out? What if I do what Dad never does and stand up for myself?

She always says it’s my fault, and some of it is, but not all of it. They were the adults. They had choices, and all of them were wrong.

Mum stands so she’s eyeballing Dad and says, “You have two options. You can forget today ever happened, or you can do what you want to do and face the consequences.”