The first time I rode that bike, I went halfway to Mount Snow and stopped, breathless at the top of a hill where you could see miles and miles of New York State stretch out below, quilted greens and browns meeting the sky.

I could never tell him how many times I’d wished I had just died in the fire.

Or how sometimes I thought I had. That I’d been a living dead boy all these years, stuck in the house with her.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” Bear said.

“I don’t know about that.”

He looked surprised. “You could have died from a burn that large,” he said.

“I meant the lucky part,” I said.

He touched my hair, and it took restraint not to flinch at his hand. “You wouldn’t be here,” he said.

I couldn’t tell him it was the luckiest I’d ever felt. I didn’t want to jinx it.

“How did you get out?” Bear asked me. We sat up in the bed. I pulled the covers up over my chest. I couldn’t keep my hand from the hair on his stomach.

“My mom,” I said. “She pulled me out with her.” That’s what she’d told me. I couldn’t remember it myself. Sometimes I had dreams about the stairway in the farmhouse, the walls licked with fire, the smoke filling my lungs. I’d feel the slap of flame on my back, hear screaming. Sometimes in the dream it was my dad. He was the one screaming. Most of the time, it was me.

“I was in the hospital for like a month,” I said. “Because of the burn, and because of some breathing issues, but I really don’t remember it. Bits and pieces sometimes.”

“Where was your mom?” Bear asked.

“She was in the hospital too,” I said. “I don’t think as long. The beam broke part of her back, and she needed surgery. And then she was out, but we lived with my grandparents, and she had, like, a brace she had to wear. And they had arrested Park, and all that happened while I was in the hospital.”

“Park is your dad,” Bear says.

“Yeah.”

“And your sister?”

I closed my eyes. I should never have said anything.

“She’s not your dad’s,” he said.

“No.”

He waited, and I felt his ankle wagging under the blankets. I could hear Buddy snoring on the floor in front of the fireplace.

“She’s a secret,” I said.

He repeated it to me.

“Yeah. I’ve never told anyone about her. Like, anyone,” I said, “ever before. My mom has never taken her to the doctor, never registered her for school. She doesn’t have a birth certificate.” I rolled my eyes upward. Saying all of it aloud felt like that stairway again, narrow and closing in with fire.

“Why?” Bear whispered.

“She’s terrified of my dad,” I said. “She’s afraid he’ll find out—that, that she had another kid, and didn’t wait for him? I don’t know. She’s super paranoid,” I said. “But to her credit, he did try to kill us.”