“Ada?”

“I… I think I might have killed Mr. Lowell.” The words come out in a jumbled rush. “I think he might be dead.”

“What?”

I wipe tears from my eyes, smearing blood on my face. I’m only making this worse. “I didn’t tell anyone what you told me—I swear. But I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him to leave you alone.”

“Ada…”

“He wouldn’t let me out of the little room.” My voice breaks. “So I had to…”

We both look down at the knife, glistening with Mr. Lowell’s blood. He’s definitely dead. I stabbed him with the knife right where Dad told me to—and I twisted it. I watched the color drain out of his face as he sank to the floor.

Oh God.

“I need to talk to Dad,” I blurt out.

Nico’s eyes widen with panic. “You can’t tell Dad. You can’t tell any grown-ups. You will be in such big trouble.”

“Dad won’t let anything bad happen to me…”

“It’s not up to him. You know what happens to kids who do bad things, right?” He chews on his lower lip. “They take you away from your parents. You have to go to this kid jail called juvenile tension. My friend said his brother had to go after he stole something. And that’s just for stealing. You killed someone.”

I start to cry. He’s right. I can’t just tell people I killed Mr. Lowell and expect not to get punished at all, even if he was the one doing something wrong.

“So what should I do?” I ask.

“Did anyone see you there?”

I shake my head no.

“Then nobody will know it was you, right?”

I look down at the knife in my hand and realize that he’s right. I can wash the blood off the knife and stuff it in the back of a drawer. I can wash the blood off the shirt and hide it in my closet. Nobody will know.

Nothing bad will happen.

PART IV

SEVENTY-FOURMILLIE

My daughter killed a man.

My eleven-year-old daughter stabbed a man, and now he’s dead. And after I hear the whole story, I wish she hadn’t killed him, so I could do it with my bare hands.

Because I would have really made him suffer.

“I’m sorry, Mom.” She’s crying so hard, it’s difficult for her to talk. “I didn’t want to do it. I just had to get out of that room.”

I’m not angry at her. She doesn’t owe me any apology. I feel sick at the thought of what was happening right under my nose. I was the one who sent Nico over there to do chores. In my defense, it seemed harmless at the time—a good way for him to take responsibility for breaking their window. I could never have imagined…

“This is not your fault, Ada.” I wrap my arms around her skinny body. “You did what you had to do. I… I would’ve done the same.”

That is an understatement.

“Where’s the shirt you were wearing?” I ask her. “The one with the blood on it?”

She wipes her eyes and crosses the room to get to her pink dresser. She rifles around for a moment until she pulls out the navy-blue shirt she’d been wearing that day and hands it over to me. If I squint, I can just barely see the stain, but I can see how the police would have missed it. They weren’t expecting to find anything incriminating in a little girl’s drawer of shirts.

“I washed it really well in the sink,” she says, although if the police had found it, they would have easily identified Jonathan’s blood.

I clutch the shirt in my hand, not sure what to do with it. Could I really turn my own daughter in for murder?

“I don’t want to go to jail,” she sniffles. “But I don’t want Dad to get in trouble when I was the one who did it.”

Enzo knew. He figured out Ada must have been the one who stabbed Jonathan after he discovered that the knife he gave her was the murder weapon. That’s why he was so quick to take the blame. I hate him for doing that. But also, I love him more than I have ever loved him before.

“You are not going to jail,” I assure her. “I promise you. We are going to call Dad’s lawyer, and she is going to straighten everything out. I swear.”

I’ve got to call Cecelia. I’ve got to tell her everything before Enzo does anything else stupid like confessing to murder to protect his daughter.

I don’t want Ada to hear this call, but I also don’t want to leave her alone when she is so fragile. As much as I have reassured her that she didn’t do anything wrong, she is still inconsolable. I need to keep a close eye on her, so I step right outside her bedroom door, keeping the door cracked open so I can see her as I click on Cecelia’s number.

Thankfully, she answers right away. “Millie? Everything okay? I just got to the police station.”

“Yeah,” I breathe, “but I heard some extremely interesting information.”

I tell her everything as quickly as I can. She is mostly silent for the entire story, although a few times, I hear her quick intake of air. It’s hard to repeat the details Ada shared with me. Honestly, it makes me sick to my stomach. I’m relieved when I’ve told her what I need to and I can stop talking.

“Jesus,” Cecelia breathes, “that’s…”

“I know.”

“Damn it, Enzo,” she mutters to herself. “He better not have said anything to the police without me. I’ve got to get in there as quickly as I can and set things straight.”

“He needs to hear everything,” I say. “If he thinks there’s a chance Ada might get punished for this, he is going to want to take the fall. He has to know that it was self-defense. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“And she’s eleven,” Cecelia reminds me. “No court would prosecute a child that age as an adult. Enzo is throwing himself on his sword for nothing.”

“Please, Cecelia, don’t let him do anything stupid.”

“Don’t worry, Millie,” Cecelia says. “I’m incredibly convincing.”

I let her go so she can do her thing, and then I am left alone with my children. And I have a pretty big job to do to make things right again.

I don’t know exactly what was going on inside that room at the Lowells’ house. If Jonathan laid a finger on my son, I will… Well, I guess I can’t kill him anymore, but I will set fire to his grave or… I’ll travel to the afterlife and wreak vengeance upon him. I can’t believe Nico was going to that house for months because he was so scared of us having to pay for some broken toys. It breaks my heart.

After all this is over, the whole family is going to need therapy. That man did a terrible thing to us, and I am determined to get my husband out of jail so we can help the kids start healing again.