Kennet lay back in the grass, with his mother’s gravestone casting a shadow across his face. Surely this was an odd, even macabre place to pass the time of day with a lady. Yet it was peaceful. He imagined Ingrid would enjoy the company and conversation. And Astrid, braiding her extra flowers into a chain, seemed in no hurry to leave. Still, Minor would have Kennet for breakfast if he found out Kennet took a girl on a date to a cemetery.

“Minor’s a twin, too,” he heard himself say.

“What?” Astrid looked up from her work and twisted this way and that, looking around the family plot.

“She doesn’t have a stone,” Kennet said. “No stone, no grave, no name. She barely had a body, so there was nothing to bury.”

She stared at him, open-mouthed. “But… What happened?”

“I don’t know really. I was only two, I have no memory of it. And like my grandparents were changed, well… You can imagine how my parents rarely talked about it.”

“Does Minor?”

“Not to me. I imagine he talks about it with Major, but I couldn’t swear an oath on that.”

“Unbelievable,” Astrid said. “Two boys named Erik, each missing a twin.”

“It’s said we Fiskares repeat our names and repeat our tragedies.”

“Did you ever notice how Minor’s profile looks different, depending on what side you stand on?”

Kennet looked at her, hands laced beneath his head, frozen in half a sit-up. He’d never not noticed the duality in his brother’s face. When Minor turned one way, his profile was fresh, wide-eyed, interested and friendly. When he faced the other, the outline of brow, nose, lips and jaw was tentative, cautious and brooding. When Minor turned dead-on and you looked him full in the face, why, right there was his missing sister. You couldn’t miss her in the asymmetrical, slightly diagonal arrangement of Minor’s features and their mercurial shift between guarded and open.

And yet, everyone Kennet knew seemed to miss it.

Astrid saw it.

“Seems like Minor fights a war that hurts him both inside and out,” she said.

I’m falling in love with you, Kennet thought.

“Nyck?”

“Hm?”

“If America goes to war, will you fight?”

“I suppose so. Minor said he’d join the Navy. Nalle wanted to join up the day Hitler invaded Poland. He was all of fifteen.”

Astrid shook her head. “Nalle is so good, it makes you wonder what war he has going on inside.”

“That’s easy. His war is missing Ma.”

“He makes me think of a word we have in Portuguese. Saudade.”

“Sawdust?”

“Saudade. It doesn’t have a direct translation. It’s an intense longing. An emotional state of melancholy and desire for things you’ve lost. Sometimes things you never had in the first place, but your heart believes they were yours.”