Father put his gun to his shoulder, and he walked out into the choking mist firing, firing, firing at the wall of soldiers. His shape was a black blur against the wall of light, and the bullets kept coming, but somehow Father kept walking—walking toward where May had been. And then he fell.

“Noooooo!” I heard a voice screaming through a throat made hoarse by the stinging gas—and I realized it was Jacob.

The soldiers were coming. And it was all over. But I didn’t care anymore.

I didn’t care because May was gone.

Because the soldiers had killed her, like they killed Mother.

Mother was gone.

Cain was gone.

May was gone.

Woof was gone.

And now Father had gone too.

The soldiers were closing in. And it was just Jacob and me left.

Make them pay, Father had said.

I held the gun out in front of me, and I walked into the yard with my eyes shut against the blinding glare of the floodlights and my finger shaking against the trigger.

I heard Jacob’s voice behind me, screaming, “Leah, Leah no!” the staccato bangs and the shriek of bullets.

I felt the weight of the gun in my hands and the white heat of the floodlights on my closed eyelids.

I held the gun out in front of me like a chalice. I pressed my finger to the trigger.

“For May,” I whispered, though I could not hear my own voice above the cacophony. “For Woof, for Mother.”

A life for a life.

Footsteps, thumping against the ground, heading toward me, coming to take me down.

I pressed the trigger. The gun kicked in my hands.

Everything went black.

When I woke, I was dead, but at least I was in heaven. My eyes were closed, but I knew because I was floating on a pleasant sea of calm, and I could hear Mother’s voice. There was pain, but it was a far-off pain that belonged to someone else, and someone was singing, high and silvery. A dancing stream, strong and sweet . . .

May. Maybe Woof would be here too.

I tried to open my eyes, but the weight of tiredness was too much, and I let myself slip back into the dark.

When I woke again, I knew I was not in heaven. For one thing it hurt. The pain I had felt before was back, and this time it very definitely belonged to me and was in my right arm. There was no singing, only an unfamiliar beep, beep, like a robot.

I tried to move, but there were sheets over me and something on my arm.

And then I heard a voice.

“Leah, darling,” the voice said. “Don’t try to move. You’re in the hospital. But you’re okay.”

Mother.

I did not want to open my eyes. I had dreamed of her many times, and I did not want the illusion to fade as it had so often before.

But when I opened my eyes, she was there. And she was not the Mother I remembered, but a woman ten years older, with short graying hair and earrings I did not recognize. But she was still Mother. And her hand, when she put it to my cheek, was real and warm and solid.

And behind her was Jacob, with eyes red from crying and that stinging gas.

And from another room I heard the voice begin again.

“Mamma mia. Hello again. Mamma mia, you were in the mist there.”

I began to cry.

It was Cain who explained what had happened. Who put together the pieces of the puzzle that I had always had but had been too young to recognize for what they were.

Father’s diatribes against the police, his meetings in the back rooms of bars with men who shared his view that the world was going to the dogs and that they needed to fight for their rights, his growing conviction that a reckoning was coming, and the guns he had begun to stockpile against that day.

And then at last Mother’s phone call to the police that final night, whispering under her breath while Father rocked May to sleep and sang to me and Jacob. “Yes, I’m worried about my husband . . . worried that he might do something stupid.”

Because there had never been a war, except in Father’s head. Or . . . perhaps that’s not quite true. There was a war, but it was between Father and the rest of the world.

It was Mother who opened the door that night to the police—the final betrayal, in Father’s eyes. And so he grabbed his children, and while Mother explained the situation in low, urgent tones, Father hurried us out a back window and over the fence into the waiting car—its engine backfiring like gunshots as it drove into the night.

If Cain suspected the truth, that Mother had not died that night, then he never said. For this Father, the one who rowed wild-eyed into the dark seas, toward an island Cain never knew existed, this Father was a stranger to him—a dangerous person with a boatful of guns. A Father who whipped and cuffed and beat his children when they disobeyed him.

And besides, Mother was dead to Father. And Father’s reality was the only one that mattered now.

Even Cain did not know what happened that day when Father came back from the mainland covered with blood. His best guess was that someone in the little port town had recognized Father, the man who had stolen his own children more than ten years before, and had perhaps tried to call the police. Father must have punched him and then beaten a hasty retreat. But after that, it was just a matter of time. There were only so many places that he could have gone, only so many islands where a fugitive with four children could hide out for ten years.

And so, after that, Father started building the wall.

It took me a long time to believe, even with Mother sitting beside me, her arm around me, firm and real as the nose on my face.

“But the bombs?” I kept asking. “I remember seeing them on the television. The bombs and the war and the children crying in the rubble. They were real, weren’t they? Father didn’t make those up.”

“They were real,” Mother said. “But they weren’t here. The war was far overseas, in a place called Syria and another called Iraq. Do you remember?”

I shook my head. I had never heard of Syria.

“And the bombs in the capital? And the schools closing?”

The bombs had been real, Mother said. But they weren’t a war. Just something called terrorists. And the schools had only ever closed for the summer holidays, as they always did. Our house—the house that Father had told me was a bombed-out shell—our house was still standing. Our school had gone back in September, with all my friends but not me.

The world had carried on. Without us.

Terrorists. I tried the word out on my tongue after Mother had gone, to check up on Jacob, who was having surgery for a broken arm. When I asked Cain later what it meant, he said people who disagreed with the government. People who used bombs and guns to get what they wanted.

He did not say people like Father. But I knew what he thought.

Because Cain had always suspected the truth. All those years, working the cows, plowing the land. Cain had known that something in Father’s story did not add up. He was old enough to remember life on the mainland more clearly, old enough to see holes in some of the stories of bombs and soldiers on the street and civil unrest. But he was still a child. And he was still Father’s son. And so he put his head down, and he accepted what he was told.

But when Father began to build the wall, Cain started to become more and more worried. And as the weeks wore on and the chores were left undone and the crops went unharvested, Cain began to believe that Father did not intend to survive the winter.