“My mom and my stepdad had a baby. The novelty of a newborn wore off for that good guy pretty fast. Five weeks in, my mom was barely sleeping, and my stepfather would look at the dishes in the sink or bang around making himself dinner and say that if she would just be a little smarter about how she handled things, she wouldn’t be falling down on the job. My sister had colic. He thought that was my mom’s fault, too.”

I could hear Gabriel grinding his teeth. As the first shard of light became visible at the end of the tunnel, I ground mine as well.

“I got used to him making my mother cry. Every time that it happened, he’d tell her—and me—that she had postpartum depression. She didn’t, but he didn’t want to admit that it was something he’d said or something he’d done that had upset her. He’d start talking about how she was emotionally unstable, about how maybe she couldn’t be trusted with my baby sister because she was so illogical and irresponsible and erratic. He said it often enough that she started to believe it, and when he told her she was failing as a wife, she believed that, too.”

Gabriel was breathing more heavily now. Every once in a while, his arm would brush my leg.

“He never hit her,” Gabriel said.

The end of the tunnel was close—five feet away, or six.

“He never hit me, but he did like slamming things around. Punching walls, right next to her face. If they were fighting and the baby started crying, he wouldn’t let my mother leave the room. He’d stand in the doorway and block her when she tried to go, telling her that if she wasn’t such a horrible excuse for a mother, maybe my sister would be sleeping through the night.”

We were almost out now.

“One day, she said something he didn’t like, and he threw a glass into the wall. It shattered. A shard hit my mother’s arm. Another came this close to my infant sister’s face.” Gabriel paused, ever so slightly. “I snapped.”

I didn’t need to ask what that meant. It meant the same thing it would have if someone had threatened Cady and Jude in front of me. Attack.

Assault.

The muscles in my neck and stomach tensing, I rolled over to my back and pulled my upper body out of the tunnel. I placed my palms beside my legs, braced, and lowered them to the ground. I was out. I was through.

Fresh air had never tasted so good. The muscles in my chest loosened, and I breathed in hungrily—again and again, like a drowning man who’d made it up for air.