Summary

The defendant guesses that his parents designed the house to augment the children’s entrapment. Their room was on the other side of the siblings’ room. While they had a bathroom, the siblings had to use the toilet in the main room and “were not allowed any privacy” (205). There was also a forbidden building beyond the lawn on the “other side of their bedroom” (206). Every part of the house thus seemed like part of the parents’ game.

The siblings would lie in the room and list words together, a game they had invented for their amusement. Other times they inhabited roles to tell each other things they needed to say. Other times still they shared memories about each other.

Then one year, the sister told the defendant her plan. She was 20 and he was 18. She proposed that on her twenty-first birthday, they kill...