Suddenly there’s an enormous crash from the kitchen, and the entire room goes eerily quiet. It’s the type of silence that’s so intense, so full, that it rings in your ears. Everyone in the room thinks the same thing, but Mom is the only one who dares to breathe the word.

“Ben.”

Mom starts to run to the kitchen and her special blue Christmas dress shimmers with unintended movement. Her face emanates utter terror, with no trace of the shame that usually accompanies one of us doing something wrong. It is the most intense fear I’ve ever seen, and just looking at her makes me afraid too.

I brush the cookie crumbs off my lap and try to slip away. I wish that they would blame me for whatever happened, since it was, after all, my fault that he was alone. But I know that I won’t receive that blow.

I make my way through the press of relatives in the living room, using my small height as a cover until I get to Auntie Leena, my mother’s sister. She looms over me, her brown hair in a tight bun, as she grabs my arm. “Why don’t you stay out here with us,” she says, and it is not a question, but I leave anyway, tugging my arm away as I scurry down the hall to the kitchen.

Approaching the door I hear small, muffled whispers, and I ­decide not to go in just yet. Instead I wait with my back pressed against the wall and take a deep breath.

Fingering the hem of my best dress, I listen to the undecipherable hush of Mom’s ­murmuring and tell myself to ignore the low rumble of everyone else in the other room. I know what they will be saying, anyway. They will be whispering how Mom can’t handle Ben and me by herself, about how this is just another example of the incredible incompetence of Lilly Lauder. But it was my fault, not hers. They should place the blame on me, Hope, not on Lilly.

I stare blankly at the scuff mark on the opposite wall that the kitchen table made when we were moving in, and wish desperately that the three of us could climb aboard a time machine and wind the dial back to before Dad left. We could live happily in the days before Mom had to take another job and was never home, before all her nasty relatives descended on us for Christmas dinner, and before I had to watch my brother every single second.

I know I shouldn’t have left Ben in the kitchen by himself, and I knew it then, but Auntie Leena ­only makes her butterscotch cookies once a year and they’re the only part of her I like. Ben can handle himself for two minutes, I had told myself. Nothing will go wrong.

All of a sudden I feel the hot burn of oncoming tears. No, I can’t cry. Nothing’s the matter. He’s just knocked something over, I tell myself. Nothing bad has happened. They’re all wrong. We won’t mess up. We can’t mess up.

And yet my only nice dress crumples as I slide down the wall, hug my knees, and let the tears leak over the cookie crumbs on my lips and drop onto my new white tights.