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PROLOGUE – SLOANE

Fifteen

According to the clock over the stove in the kitchen, the lock on Raymond’s study takes me eleven minutes. I fiddle with the bobby pin while my mother rolls out pie dough and doesn’t notice I’m in the hallway on my knees.

Inside, it smells like cedar and cigarettes. The bottom drawer of the desk holds a shoebox. The shoebox holds a stack of gray pamphlets, a ledger full of names in tight, slanted handwriting, and a photograph of a long white building with a burned tree stamped in the corner. The same tree appears on the front of every pamphlet, drawn in ash-black ink.

Purity through pain.

I read the line three times before the floor creaks.

My mother stands in the doorway with flour to her elbows.

“Put it back.”

“What is this?” I ask, ignoring her.

“Sloane. Put it back.” Her voice stays flat. I think she practices doing it. “Please. He counts things.”

“Mom, look at it. Look at what he⁠—”

“I know what it is.”

She doesn’t say another word. She waits until I slide the shoebox into the drawer and lock the door behind me, then presses a folded dish towel into my hands.

That night at dinner, Raymond passes me the green beans and smiles. My stepfather doesn’t need a bobby pin to get into my room.

Later, I stare at the cracks on my ceiling and count them. Eleven. I count them for a long time. I count them every night that year, and the year after, until the numbers lose all meaning.

Seventeen

My mother meets me in the garage at four in the morning with a coffee can.

“Three hundred and forty,” she whispers. “It’s everything.”

“Come with me,” I beg.

“He’ll check the phone. Don’t call.” She presses the can into my chest and looks past my shoulder at the street, at anything but my face. “There’s a Greyhound out of Columbia at six. Go north. Go far.”

“Mom.”

“Go,” she hisses.

I go.

By the second week I’m in Lexington, throwing up behind a gas station. By the third, I’m sitting on a paper-covered table in a free clinic while a nurse with reading glasses pushed into her gray hair frowns at a chart.

“When was your last period, hon?”

I count backward. Frown. Count again. “That can’t be right.”

“Sixteen weeks, give or take.” She sets the clipboard on her knee. “Do you have somewhere safe to stay?”

“I have a bus pass,” I say dumbly.

“That’s not what I asked.”

The room goes quiet enough for me to hear the fluorescent tube humming overhead. I look at my hands, at the chipped polish on my thumbnail, and I don’t say I was abused by my stepfather. She reads it off my face anyway, and her eyes somehow go hard and gentle at once.