Page sighs. “She’s wanted to tell you for so long that she doesn’t blame you for anything. None of us do. But Mom especially.” The waiter comes with our drinks and she takes a sip of hers. “We didn’t really know Tom, is the issue. We didn’t really know Odilie. Except Mom denies that, of course. We only met Penelope when she came to Michigan right before the deaths. No one was invited to her birth, anything having to do with their little family. But no one likes reporting that. It doesn’t fit well with the tale of the saintly woman who doted on her father, only to be ripped away from the earth by her sociopathic, philandering husband.” Page clinks the ice in her glass. At a table behind us a small dachshund starts whining for its owners’ food.

I sit there, hand shaking as I sip the crisp wine. Page is right. That is not what I had envisioned at all. In all my dark, lost spirals into which my own worst feelings about myself had plummeted, not once had I suspected that Odilie’s family didn’t know their own daughter, their own granddaughter. “Did she just move away and stop keeping in touch?”

Page fishes the lime from her glass, sucks on it like a teething baby. “She met Tom when she was super young and then she basically vanished from our lives. She wasn’t exactly estranged. She would call us out of the blue sometimes. We were all friends on socials. Once or twice she and Tom visited us. But otherwise, there was this strange barrier between us and them. It wasn’t breakable. And God, my mom tried. But Odilie and Tom were very quiet with her, and quiet about each other.” She drinks the melted ice. “And now my folks are suddenly parenting a toddler again, which is a whole other type of weird. Penelope won’t remember her own parents. She’s too young. She stopped asking where ‘Mama’ was months ago. I think my mom didn’t want to bring her here because she was afraid she’d recognize something, be traumatized or whatever.”

I want to ask about Odilie, about the transformation on her Instagram, but I stop myself. Page seems to be on a ramble, and maybe this is a long-delayed, much-needed speech for her. And I’m not ready yet to admit to being such a stalker, to spending so many hours perusing her dead sister’s old life.