We had left Seattle entirely.

We had needed to — needed new walls that had never held any of it, a new town where no one knew the story unless we chose to tell them, a house where every room was ours and clean of the past.

I sat on the wooden porch swing with a mug of coffee and watched the morning mist rise off the valley, and a few yards away on the damp lawn, my youngest raced in wild, giggling circles with Barnaby, the golden retriever puppy we had brought home six months after the trial — the puppy she had once been promised as a bribe for her own silence, and now simply had, freely, as a dog, because a child should have a dog and never a price.

Her older sisters, Hazel and Kelly, sat on the porch steps nearby — Hazel, fourteen now, sketching in a charcoal pad, and Kelly, twelve, patiently retying Fiona’s shoelaces every time the little girl zoomed past and lost one.