“Are you okay?” Lily asked, taking her daughter’s hair into her hands, long and cool like the body of a snake. The house pet kind, the kind that isn’t supposed to hurt you, but still you check the lock on the cage.

“What did Dad say this morning?” Mickey asked, her eyes down.

Lily paused. She knew enough about this parenting game to know she had a precious moment here: her daughter thought she knew something she did not. She didn’t want to blow it.

“First, how are you feeling?”

“Embarrassed. Is he still super mad?”

“That will depend.” She needed to find Silas.

Mickey sighed and started up the stairs. That’s when Lily saw the bandage.

“What happened?” she asked, forgetting the slow game of parenting an adolescent, eager to touch where her daughter hurt, eager to absorb it into her own body if that’s what it took to make it better. Mickey pulled her arm back.

“Nothing, just a scrape. From when Ruth and I raced in the woods.”

“Did you put Neosporin on it? You don’t want it to get infected.”

“Yeah, it’s fine. Seriously,” Mickey said. And then she pitched forward into Lily’s chest. “Thanks, Mom.”

Lily wrapped both arms around her daughter, holding her still for longer than she had in over a year.

“Love you,” Mickey said as she broke free, then climbed the steps two at a time and closed the door behind her. And just like that, Lily was alone again. The house silent save for the single flower on the dining room table, red as loud as screaming.

Once they found out she had taken a walk that night all those years ago, the detectives wouldn’t stop hounding Lily. They said they could get them all arrested for underage drinking. They said they could lock the whole family up and throw away the key. They saw her for what she was: a teenage girl who had her perfect life laid out in front of her, if not a little rushed. It was what she wanted: Silas, a baby. Even if it was a few years earlier than she would’ve liked, it was still exactly what she wanted. They held their adult faces straight as stone and threatened to take all of it away if she didn’t testify to what she saw.

But she was their only witness.

The only one who could say for certain she saw Philip holding Sarah’s body, limp like her bones had slipped out. Like every solid part of her had melted with the water that dripped from her hair. Even in his arms, she was already a ghost.

But she wasn’t a ghost, was she? Lily thought as she turned away from the dining room and peered out the window for a sign of Silas. Not in this house. Here, she was as real as color, as sound.

As real as silence.

PEYOTE