Chapter 1 - The Chain on My Neck
I was eight years old the night I learned what a collar was.
It was a party at our house, the big one on Bellhaven Road with the marble floors my mother used to say were too cold for bare feet.
People filled the downstairs rooms in dark suits and bright dresses, and the noise of their glasses and their laughing rolled up the stairs and under my door.
Vanessa had come to my room an hour before to help me get ready, which was strange, because Vanessa never helped me with anything.
She brushed my hair so hard it pulled at my scalp and told me I needed to look grateful tonight.
"Grateful for what?"
I asked.
She didn't answer.
That should have been the moment I understood something was wrong, but I was eight, and eight-year-olds believe the adults around them know what they're doing.
When she led me downstairs by the wrist, the room went quiet in patches, like people were noticing us and then looking away.
Vanessa walked me to the center of the marble floor, and that's when she took the silver chain out of her purse.
It was a dog chain.
I knew that immediately, because our neighbor Mrs. Alvarez had a terrier named Biscuit, and Biscuit had a chain exactly like it, only smaller.
"What are you doing?"
I asked.
She didn't answer that either.
She knelt down in front of me, and I remember thinking she looked almost gentle for a second, the way she tilted her head.
She fastened the clasp around my neck, and the metal was cold and heavy, and it didn't sit right against my collarbone.
Then she stood up and pointed at a plate of food someone had set down on the floor near the wall.
"Crawl over there and eat."
I couldn't move.
My whole body felt like it belonged to someone else, someone watching from the ceiling.
"I'm not a dog," I said.
My voice came out small, but I said it, and I remember being proud of that for one second before Vanessa laughed.
Not at me.
At the room, like she was performing.
"Crawl," she said again, softer this time.
"Or I'll tell your father how ungrateful you've been."
I remember the word ungrateful more than anything, because I didn't know what I had done.
The doors at the far end of the hall opened, and my father walked in.
He had been in the study with the other men, which is where he always went during parties, and he was holding a glass and half-smiling at something someone had said.
Then he saw me.
The glass didn't drop.
He just stopped, mid-step, and everything in his face went blank.
"Daddy," I said.
He crossed the floor so fast that people stepped back, and he knelt down and worked the clasp open with his fingers.
The chain fell onto the marble with a sound I still hear sometimes, a thin little clink, like a spoon on a saucer.
He pulled me behind him, and his hand was shaking against my shoulder.
"What did you do to my daughter?"
Vanessa's chin went up.
"I was teaching her a lesson."
"A lesson," he repeated.
I started crying then, because the way he said it was worse than shouting, and because the whole room was staring at me, and because I still had the mark of the clasp on my neck.
"She said you wouldn't believe me," I told him.
I don't know why I said it.
It just came out.
Vanessa's face did something strange when I said that, and my father went very still.
Then a boy stepped out of the crowd.
He was fourteen or fifteen, one of the guests' kids, tall and nervous, and he was holding up his phone with the screen turned toward my father.
"Mr. Ethan," he said.
"You need to see what Vanessa told Lily before you came downstairs."
Vanessa's face went pale so fast it looked like someone had turned a switch.
"Put that away," she said.
"I'm sorry, ma'am," he said, and he didn't put it away.
"I recorded it."
The room had gone so quiet that I could hear the caterer's cart squeaking somewhere in the back.
My father took the phone and looked at it for a long time, and I couldn't see the screen, only his shoulders going rigid.
I heard a woman near the doorway whisper, "She's been planning this for weeks," to the man beside her.
I didn't know what that meant, and I didn't have room in my head to figure it out.
What I remember is my father saying, very quietly, "We're leaving.
Tonight.
Get your bag."
"Ethan, don't be ridiculous," Vanessa said.
"We're leaving the state," he said.
"Tonight."
And he picked me up, chain still on the floor, and carried me up the stairs.
