Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve is the temporal anchor for the Solomon family’s fatal home invasion: almost exactly ten years before Katherine Solomon spoke with Dr. Abaddon, her mother was killed during a robbery at their home. The event returns not as a fully narrated scene but through Peter Solomon’s account, relayed by Dr. Abaddon and challenged by Katherine.

The Night of the Attack

An intruder broke into the family home looking for something he believed Peter was hiding. The demand seemed senseless to Katherine and the others at the time. Peter shot the intruder dead, but their mother died in Peter’s arms. The evidence gives no calendar year for the attack, only its placement on Christmas Eve and its distance of almost ten years from the later conversation.

Peter’s Account and Guilt

In the account he gave Dr. Abaddon, Peter said he had understood what the intruder wanted but pretended not to know. He believed that cooperating might have saved his mother, and Abaddon identified that belief as the source of Peter’s guilt. Katherine rejected the suggestion that her brother had misunderstood or invented what happened, insisting that Peter was far from delusional; the account nevertheless exposed a painful interpretation of the family’s past that she had not known he carried.

The Date’s Narrative Significance

Christmas Eve marks both the mother’s death and the beginning of Peter’s enduring self-blame. The delayed disclosure changes the meaning of the attack: what Katherine had remembered as an incomprehensible demand becomes, in Peter’s telling, a choice he believes he made and cannot undo. Because the event reaches the reader through Abaddon’s report of Peter’s confession and Katherine’s response, its immediate force lies not only in the death itself but in the family’s sharply different understandings of what Peter knew.