So she went to him instead. And at home she argued with my grandparents behind closed doors late at night. Their voices grew louder, their silences sharper, until one day she packed her things and mine, and took me away to a house with tarps for walls and the sky for a ceiling and a man who would be our undoing.

I was thirteen years old.

But, of course, I would not tell Lee all of that. I knew enough to be careful with him now.

“The end,” I said. “Your turn. But only if you want to.”

He looked across the field, out past the bluffs. “Once upon a time there was a boy and he was scared,” he said, talking fast. “He was scared because his mother turned into a monster. And he wanted to tell his dad about it, but his dad was a monster, too. So he hid for a long time. It was dark. No one found him and he fell asleep.”

Oh, Lee. I placed my hand on his back, between his shoulder blades. I would have carried all his pain for him if I could.

“How does it end?” I asked him.

“One day some people found him, with flashlights and badges, and they took him from one place to another place, until he ended up here. I mean, until he ended up in a pretty white house with a lot of nice people. And none of them were monsters. And he lived happily ever after. The end.”

My eyes stung but I blinked the tears back, glad he wasn’t looking.

“Did I do it right?” he asked.

“Yes,” I told him. “Yes. You did it right.” I knew it was fast—we had known each other only for a very short time—but love for him swelled in my chest. I thought I could save us both. So I said, “Lee, I’ve been thinking. Maybe . . . when you feel the way you do sometimes. When you get scared in your chest and your stomach, you could try to invite what scares you in. Pay attention to it. Let it play back in your memory. I’m only now understanding it myself, but I think we have to face the things that scare us in order to move on from them. It might be the only way to stop being afraid.”

He turned to his side to look at me.

“Do you understand?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think so.”

And then Julia was crossing the field toward us, on her way to announce the end of school. She hovered above—employer, adoptive mother, giver of our happy endings—white haired and beaming.

“School time is over.” She rang the bell and the three of us laughed.

“Want to go in for a snack?” Lee asked me.