To open it together would have meant admitting that it was real — that it had not been strict parenting or a hard woman or the ordinary friction of family, but a thing with a name, done to both of us, by the person we were supposed to be able to trust more than anyone alive.

Alone, each of us could almost believe we had exaggerated it.

Together, we could not.

Two people cannot both have imagined the same belt.

That was the terror of finally talking, and it was also, it turned out, the beginning of getting free: the moment my brother said out loud that it had happened to him too, I could no longer pretend it had not happened to me.

Chapter 4 — The Recording