“And what do you do?” I looked at our shared reflection in the glass — the same face we had always had, but no longer the face of two terrified girls standing side by side, waiting to see who would be hurt first.

“I wake up,” I told her.

“And then I remember that he can never touch us again.” We walked down the bright corridor together, side by side, unhurried, our footsteps matching on the clean floor.

For three years, quiet in a room had meant that danger was coming — that he had closed the curtains and turned up the television and it was about to begin.

I had learned to hear silence as a warning.