Snowflakes

by Ruth Ware

When Father began to build the wall, we didn’t understand at first. We thought it was to keep something in—not

It couldn’t be to keep anything out. There wasn’t anyone on the island but us. But as the wall grew higher and higher, we began to wonder.

It never became easy, but like the frog in the pan, you can get accustomed to almost anything.

The schools closed, and Father explained that life was getting harder for people like us, that our freedoms were getting chipped away at and that soon we would not have any rights at all—and then one awful night it happened.

“By the skin of our teeth,” Father said afterward, though I never did understand what he meant, because teeth have no skin. They are hard and white like bone. Did he mean that we did not get away completely?

There were some truths too terrible to tell, some things it was better not to know.

He has left us. He has left us to deal with whatever is coming by ourselves. He is never coming back.

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.

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.

Fake news. Media propaganda. They’re blinding you to the truth, boy. And Cain was done with Father’s truth.

It took our shattered hearts even longer to heal. How do you relearn everything you thought was the truth? How do you make your life again?