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VIOLET

“Who do you think is in there?” asked Coral.

They’d hatched a plan. Coral was going to wait in the car with the engine running, and Violet was going to ring the bell, then step back toward the vehicle.

“Blake, for one,” answered Violet. She stared at the door. The house had the air of desertion; it was hard to imagine someone inside. Why was it so familiar, though? Had she been here? When?

So Violet would ring the bell, move back toward the car, and then if anything should go crazy-bad, if Violet couldn’t get back to the car, Coral was supposed to call 9-1-1 and drive away.

It was getting late. The challenge would be starting any minute. Her mom was out there, probably worrying about why she hadn’t heard from them. How could Blake do this? Why had he come here, to this place?

They weren’t supposed to keep secrets from each other. That was her mom’s number one rule. Secrets were poison, she said. They leaked into any system and corroded from within. When someone asked you to keep a secret, you had to question that person’s motive. When you held something back from someone you loved, you had to ask yourself why. The answer, more often than not, said her mom, was fear. You were afraid of the truth, to tell it, to face it.

Violet had kept a secret.

A couple of months before her father disappeared, she’d awoken to hear his voice carrying up from downstairs. She was used to hearing her dad talk on the phone—his work voice, she always thought of it. The work voice was very different from the one he used with Violet and Blake or the soft, low tones he used with Mom. She couldn’t say how it was different exactly, but the work voice was kind of like maybe he was on stage: passionate, sometimes a little angry. The voice she heard that night wasn’t any of those.

He sounded…scared.

Violet crept from her bed and out into the hallway, moving silently past Blake’s room, her parents’ room where her mom was still sound asleep, breathing heavily.

Violet lingered at the top of the stairs, something telling her not to go down. And even now she sometimes wondered, if she hadn’t gone down, hadn’t heard what she heard, maybe nothing that followed would have happened.

But that wasn’t true—that’s what Dr. S. told her. That was magical thinking, he told her. That as a kid, she wasn’t responsible for the mistakes her parents made. It was their job to protect her, not hers to protect them. There had been no mystical fork in the road as she stood at the top of the stairs, deciding whether or not to go down.

Then there was another sound, one she didn’t recognize at all.

She found herself following it past all the family pictures that lined the staircase, past the front door where her and Blake’s backpacks hung ready for the morning rush to the car. Her father was sitting hunched on the couch, head in hands.

He was crying.

The sight of it filled her with dread, confused her. Her mom cried all the time. If she was sad, tired, frustrated, even watching Moana . But dads didn’t cry. Her dad especially. He was perpetually upbeat, never even angry with them.

Violet thought about going back to her room, but instead she came to sit beside him. He jumped, then looked at her, stricken. Batted at the tears coming from his eyes, pulled a fake smile.

“Violet,” he said. “Honey, I’m sorry.”

“What’s wrong, Dad?”

He dropped an arm around her, pulled her tight. He smelled of soap and linen. “Nothing. Just some stuff going on at work. I’m…overtired.”

What at work could make her dad cry ?

“It’s okay, Dad,” she said. “Just make a list of all the things you have to do, and then it won’t seem like so much.”

He’d given her that advice a thousand times when she got stressed about school. He held her tighter.

“That’s great advice,” he said, kissing her on the top of her head. “How’d you get so grown-up?”

It was a question that didn’t need an answer, so she just sat with him for a while, pressing herself against him, listening to his heart beating.

“Hey,” he said, finally. “It’s getting late. Let’s get you back to bed.”

He walked her upstairs, tucked her in, and kissed her on the forehead.

“Hey, V,” he said. “Let’s have this be our little secret, okay? Mom would just be worried if she knew I was upset.”

She nodded, even though her parents had told her a hundred, a thousand times that no one good would ever ask you to keep a secret from one of your parents. But this was different, right? Private was not the same as secret . That was another hard-to-understand distinction. It was private that her mom had an ap pointment for a bikini wax. It wasn’t a secret, but your teacher didn’t need to hear about it.

Later, after everything, she’d wonder again and again if things would have been different if she had told her mother that her dad was upset enough about something at work that he’d cried .

Why she was thinking about this as she approached the door, she didn’t know. Just that it was another one of those moments when there were other, better choices. And she chose this one.

She rang the bell, once, twice, hard so that it couldn’t be ignored.

Then she ran back halfway between the house and the car, Coral watching intently from the driver’s seat, her cell phone clutched in her hand. Violet was breathless, a vein throbbing in her throat.

But when the door swung open, it was just her brother standing there. Not bound or gagged, not kidnapped.

“What took you so long?” he asked, moving back inside.

“What took me so long?” she said, following him.

She heard Coral yelling, “Violet! Violet! What’s happening?”

“What the actual fuck, Blake?”

“You think I didn’t know you put LifeTracker on my phone?” he called back, his voice echoing in the unfurnished space.

She stopped at the door.

She remembered: there had been a big sectional over there, a television mounted on the wall. Outside, visible though the sliding-glass doors, there had been a swing set, and down the path into the woods there was a tree house.

Coral came up behind her, smelling of bubble gum and lilac.

“ What is happening ?”

“I have no idea,” she said as she followed her brother inside.

As she turned the corner into the kitchen, she saw him.

Grayer, thinner than she remembered, than he appeared to her in her dreams. He had dark circles under his eyes, a salt-and-pepper beard. She stood staring, stunned. She opened her mouth, but no words came. Distantly, she was aware of a hurricane brewing—a terrible swirl of rage, grief, sadness, relief, surprise, joy.

She staggered back into Coral, who held her shoulders tight.

Coral issued a gasp. “Holy missing persons,” she whispered.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, rising.

Violet lifted a hand, indicating that he should stay back, and he stopped where he stood.

“Hi, Dad.”