"No, dearest," her mother whispered, the pain bowing her in on herself. “No. Get me that blue bottle of pills in the medicine cabinet. Hurry, Sally. The blue bottle."

As she watched her mother swallow three of the pills, groaning as she did so, she realized the pills were there because her father had struck her mother before. Deep down, Sally had known it. She hated herself because she'd never asked, never said a word.

That night her mother became Noelle, and the next week Sally left her girls' school and moved back to her parents' home in Washington, D.C., in hopes of protecting her mother. She read everything she could find on abuse-not that it helped.

That was ten years ago, though sometimes it seemed like last week. Noelle had stayed with her husband, refusing to seek counseling, refusing to read any of the books Sally brought her. It made no sense to Sally, but she'd stayed as close as possible, until she'd met Scott Brainerd at the Whistler exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and married him two months later.

She didn't want to think about Scott or about her father now. Despite her vigilance, she knew her father had hit Noelle whenever she happened to be gone from the house. She'd seen the bruises her mother had tried to hide from her, seen her walking carefully, like an old woman. Once he broke her mother's arm, but Noelle refused to go to the hospital, to the doctor, and ordered Susan to keep quiet. Her father just looked at her, daring her, and she did nothing. Nothing.

Her fingers rubbed unconsciously over the white line where the ring had been. She could remember the past so clearly-her first day at school, when she was on the seesaw and a little boy pointed, laughing that he saw her panties.

It was just the past week that was a near blank in her mind. The week her father had been killed. The whole week was like a very long dream that had almost dissolved into nothing more than an occasional wisp of memory with the coming of the morning.