Only Sonia watches me with wide eyes, the kind of look that makes me feel as if I’m a new person. Or have grown fur. Or turned into a dragon. She’s eaten none of the meat loaf on her plate, and only a few of the potatoes I’d run to the store to buy after the falling-out with Patrick this afternoon.

“Will I have another bad dream?” she asks.

Automatically, I respond with the wrong kind of question. “What makes you think that, honey?” I rephrase. “No. I won’t let the bad dreams happen. And I’ll tell you a story when I tuck you in, okay?”

She nods. The number on her wrist glows 40. “Scared,” she says.

“No reason to be.”

Sam and Leo exchange a nervous look, and I shake my head at them. Steven raises one finger to his lips, his silent sign to his baby sister, something normal.

Then Sonia nods again. Her eyes—Patrick’s Irish hazel—are glazed over with unfallen tears.

“You’re still afraid?” I ask.

Another nod.

“Of the bad dreams?”

Now she shakes her head.

The thing is, Sonia doesn’t know what the wrist counters do, other than glow brightly and show her numbers and pulse against her wrist, one time for each word she speaks. We’ve been careful to keep this secret from her. Maybe it’s a foolish thing, but I’ve never been able to figure out exactly how to describe an electric jolt of pain to a six-year-old. It would be like telling a child about the horrors of the electric chair in order to instill some sense of right and wrong. Grisly, and unnecessary. What parent would enumerate the exact workings of Old Sparky to get their kid not to fib or steal?

When the counters went on our wrists—there was no acclimation period, not even for children—I decided to go about it from the opposite direction. A scoop of ice cream, an extra cookie before bed, hot cocoa with as many marshmallows as would fit in the cup whenever Sonia nodded or shook her head or tugged on my sleeve instead of speaking. Positive reinforcement rather than punishment. I didn’t want her to learn the hard way. Not like I had.

Also, I knew something else about the counters. The pain increases with each infraction.

There was no time for me, on that first day, to process the steady surge in charge. Patrick explained, afterward, as he applied cold cream to the scar on my wrist.

“First word over a hundred, and you’ll get a slight shock, Jean. Nothing disabling, just a little jolt. A warning. You’ll perceive it, but it won’t actually hurt.”

Terrific, I thought.