“Let her fall,” my mother said as my father ground his boot into my fingers and my sister filmed me hanging from a cliff. My six-year-old son screamed for help while they laughed, called me garbage, and walked away. I survived on a ledge below. Three weeks later, I learned Kaye had recorded everything—and that changed who was trapped....

The Mercer house was a two-story split-level built in 1978.

It had wood siding painted an aggressive slate blue, white trim that was peeling near the gutters, and an asphalt driveway that Thomas pressure-washed every single Saturday morning from April to October.

The neighborhood was full of houses just like it—inhabited by retired machinists, school district administrators, and widows who kept ceramic geese on their front porches dressed in seasonal outfits.

To anyone driving down Maple Street, the Mercer house was an anchor of suburban propriety.

The lawn was edged within a quarter-inch of the concrete curb. The brass house numbers were polished with Brasso once a month.

When Ethan and I walked up the driveway, the silver crossover was parked in its usual spot.

The hood was cool to the touch.

Through the large picture window of the living room, the television was on. The blue glow of a college football game flickered across the beige drapes.

I pushed the front door open with my hip.

It wasn't locked. Thomas never locked the door during the day. He claimed that locking a door in broad daylight was "what people in cities do because they don't trust their neighbors."

The smell of the hallway hit me first: lemon-scented furniture polish, damp wool, and the lingering, greasy aroma of fried pork chops.

They had eaten dinner.

They had come home from the coast, washed their hands, fried pork chops, and sat down at the maple table to eat.

Thomas was in his leather recliner. The footrest was up. He had a can of Coors Light sitting on a cork coaster on the side table. His glasses were perched on the end of his nose, reflecting the flickering yard lines of the football field.

Eleanor sat at the dining room table, twelve feet away. A wicker basket of freshly laundered dish towels sat before her. She was smoothing them flat with her palms, folding them into precise thirds, and stacking them in neat, rectangular towers.

Kaye was stretched out on the floral-print sofa, her stockinged feet hooked over the armrest. She was wearing a clay face mask, the pale green paste drying into cracked plates around her nostrils and mouth.

She was tapping her screen with a fingernail that clicked: tap, tap, tap.

None of them looked up when the deadbolt clicked shut behind us.

"You're tracking salt onto the rug," Eleanor said.

She didn't stop folding. She took the corner of a yellow dish towel, squared it with her thumbnail, and laid it on the stack.

"I asked you six years ago, June, to take your shoes off at the mat. You have no respect for property."

Thomas took a slow pull from his beer can. He set it back down on the cork coaster, his eyes never leaving the television screen.

"You took your sweet time," Thomas said. His tone was conversational. He might have been commenting on the mail arriving twenty minutes late. "Did you take a cab? Because if you spent my money on a cab from the junction, you can pack your bags tonight."

I didn't answer.

I stood in the center of the foyer, my left arm bound tight against my ribs in the dark blue medical immobilizer, my right hand a club of white gauze and fiberglass.

Ethan was pressed against my left thigh, his little fingers knotted into the denim of my jeans so hard that his joints showed white.

Kaye finally glanced over the top of her phone.

She looked at my sling.

She looked at the fiberglass splint.

A slow, ugly ripple of amusement broke through the dry green clay around her mouth, causing the mask to flake onto the sofa cushions.

"Look at you," Kaye said. "You look like a mummy that crawled out of a dumpster."

"Kaye," Eleanor chided mildly. "Don't encourage her. She wants the attention."

"I don't want your attention, Eleanor," I said.

My voice didn't shake. That was the first thing that surprised me. It was low, raspy from the sea salt and the screaming, but it had an iron core that had never been there before.

Thomas's eyes flicked away from the football game.

He turned his head.

He looked at my face—at the scab forming across my cheekbone, at the cold, blank gaze I directed back at him.

His eyes narrowed. The mustache twitched.

"What did you just call your mother?" he asked, his voice dropping into that heavy, threatening baritone that had sent me scurrying to my bedroom throughout my adolescence.

"Her name is Eleanor," I said. "And yours is Thomas."

Thomas lowered the footrest of the recliner with a sharp clack. He planted his boots on the carpet—the same boots that had stood on my hand four hours ago—and leaned forward, resting his thick forearms on his knees.

"You think because you had a little tumble, you get to come into this house and disrespect us?" he said, pointing a thick, calloused finger at my chest. "You're thirty-one years old, June. You don't have a college degree. You don't have a husband. You've got an eight-dollar-an-hour job testing wastewater for coliform bacteria, and you have that kid because you were too stupid to keep your knees together in the back of a Chevy."

Ethan flinched against my side.

I placed my left hand—the bruised, swollen fingers of my left hand—over Ethan's ear, pressing his face into my hip.

"Don't speak in front of him," I said.

"I'll speak however I want in my own goddamned house!" Thomas roared, standing up. He was six-foot-one, broad-shouldered, with the belly of a beer drinker and the arms of a man who had pulled wrenches for forty years. "I built this house! I pay the taxes! If I say you're garbage, you're garbage! And if you don't like it, you can take that bastard and sleep in the park!"

"We're going to our room," I said.

I turned toward the stairs.

"Don't you turn your back on your father!" Eleanor yelled, dropping a folded towel. "You apologize to him! You apologize for ruining our Saturday! Kaye was supposed to have her engagement photos planned this afternoon, and we had to listen to park rangers asking idiot questions because your boy couldn't keep his mouth shut!"

I kept walking.

I took the stairs one by one, using my hip against the drywall for balance.

Behind me, Kaye’s voice drifted up, dripping with theatrical pity:

"Just let her go, Mom. She's going to cry herself to sleep anyway. She always does."

We reached the small bedroom at the end of the hall—the room that had been mine since I was eight, the room with the water stain in the corner of the ceiling shaped like Lake Superior.

I pushed the door shut with my shoulder.

There was no lock. Thomas had taken the lock off my door when I was fourteen after I tried to keep Kaye from taking my school clothes. He had said: Nobody has secrets in this family.

I dragged the heavy pine chest of drawers across the linoleum until it jammed under the brass knob.

It wasn't much.

A sixty-pound dresser against an eighty-pound door wouldn't stop Thomas Mercer if he decided to put his shoulder into it. But it would give me three seconds of noise.

Three seconds to grab the heavy brass lamp from the bedside table with my good hand.

Ethan stood in the middle of the room, looking around at the narrow twin bed, the faded floral bedspread, and the milk crates full of his picture books.

"Mama?" he whispered.

"We're packing, Ethan," I said.

"Tonight?"

"No," I whispered, sitting down heavily on the edge of the mattress as my left hip finally gave out. "Not tonight. Tonight we have nowhere to go, and I have six dollars in my purse."

Ethan walked over to the bed. He didn't ask about his toys. He didn't ask about dinner, though his stomach gave a long, hollow growl that made him press both hands against his belly.

He reached into his pocket.

He pulled out a single, crushed granola bar wrapped in foil. The corner was torn, the oats gray with lint from his jacket.

"The ranger lady gave it to me," he said. He held it out on his flat palm. "I saved it for you. Because your hands hurt."

I looked at that crushed, lint-covered piece of oat and sugar.

I looked at my six-year-old boy, who had stood on a three-hundred-foot cliff edge and screamed until his vocal cords bled while three adults with church directories in their glove compartments walked away to eat clam chowder.

"You eat it, Ethan," I choked out.

"We share," he said firmly.