I didn’t stay long on Buck’s Peak, maybe a week. On the day I left the

mountain, Audrey asked me not to go. I have no memory of the
conversation, but I remember writing the journal entry about it. I
wrote it my first night back in Cambridge, while sitting on a stone
bridge and staring up at King’s College Chapel. I remember the river,
which was calm; I remember the slow drift of autumn leaves resting on
the glassy surface. I remember the scratch of my pen moving across the
page, recounting in detail, for a full eight pages, precisely what my
sister had said. But the memory of her saying it is gone: it is as if I
wrote in order to forget.

Audrey asked me to stay. Shawn was too strong, she said, too
persuasive, for her to confront him alone. I told her she wasn’t alone,
she had Mother. Audrey said I didn’t understand. No one had believed
us after all. If we asked Dad for help, she was sure he’d call us both
liars. I told her our parents had changed and we should trust them.
Then I boarded a plane and took myself five thousand miles away.

If I felt guilty to be documenting my sister’s fears from such a safe
distance, surrounded by grand libraries and ancient chapels, I gave
only one indication of it, in the last line I wrote that night: Cambridge
is less beautiful tonight.

—

DREW HAD COME WITH me to Cambridge, having been admitted to a
master’s program in Middle Eastern studies. I told him about my
conversation with Audrey. He was the first boyfriend in whom I
confided about my family—really confided, the truth and not just
amusing anecdotes. Of course all that is in the past, I said. My family is
different now. But you should know. So you can watch me. In case I do