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her, listening carefully to her, allowing her to talk at her own pace. She was all too familiar with people’s body language when she had to think over what she was saying. The impatient huffs of breath, leg-jiggling or foot-tapping. Looking up at the ceiling, looking down at the watch, doodling. She’d seen it all.
    She wasn’t seeing it here. She was seeing two men hearing her out with no signs of anything but interest.
    And since they were, she didn’t stammer. It came out as smoothly as if she were discussing the plot of a movie she’d once seen.
    “I’ll come to that. When I was finally released, because there wasn’t anything else medicine could do for me, it was summer and there was no school. I was actually ahead two grades because about the only thing I could do in the hospitals and clinics was study. I found it . . . hard, being home. My father acted very strange around me and my mother—my mother acted strange when he acted strange. They were both very strange, though I didn’t have much to compare them with.
    “I couldn’t figure anything out. We had these strained conversations about nothing at all. They never asked me any questions, I never asked any of them. They were both gone a lot because of business. It was a little like being back in the hospital, only I was dressed and could go out if I wanted. Then one day, my father came home early.” Chloe closed her eyes. She’d had endless therapy but the memory could still jolt her out of her serenity. In an instant, she was right back there, living it, not remembering it.
    A sunny day in Boston, hot and humid. She’d found a whole wardrobe of pretty summer dresses in her room, an unusual gesture of kindness from her mother. She’d spent so long in the hospital gowns and track suits; the pretty clothes delighted her.
    Being outdoors was still a novelty for her, a treat. The feel of the sun on her face and the breeze in her hair a shocking delight, even on a humid Boston summer day. She’d had on a sundress with spaghetti straps and no bra because really, why wear a bra when your breasts were like two small teacups? The house had a garden, one she delighted in exploring. A Mexican came twice a week to do the heavy lifting in the garden. Mr. Martinez. Diego. Old and kindly, willing to explain to her what he was doing. Telling her the names of the flowers in both English and Spanish. She spent hours in the sunshine with him without ever thinking that maybe she was interrupting his work.
    Coming in from the garden that day with a fistful of asters, flushed from the sun, she came across her father staring at her intently.
    He walked right up to her, looming over her. He’d been a big man, very tall, and he used his size and height to intimidate everyone around him. Certainly her mother was often intimidated, as were the cook and the maid and the few dinner guests they sometimes had. He intimidated her all the time, which she dealt with by rarely being in the same room with him.
    Without really realizing what she was doing, something she recognized only in hindsight and after painful therapy, she had avoided him as much as she could. Walking out of a room the moment he entered, keeping furniture between them, stepping back when he approached her.
    Her skin crawled if he got too close to her. Once, as she brushed by him, the hairs on her forearm rose.
    That day, there was no walking away from him. He cornered her, big hands against her shoulders, pressing her against a red damask-covered wall.
    God, she remembered the instant panic, full-blown, almost outsized for that specific moment, as if this were a situation she’d already faced. Chloe had even sometimes wondered if she was in some way psychic because her nightmares were and always had been of being with her back to a wall and having a huge man attack her.
    She’d had every variation of that nightmare, over and over again. And that afternoon, it became reality.
    “Did he?” Mike Keillor’s very