Annie winced. Yes, she remembered. Murphy and Stan had been a love match envied by many in the early nineties, the fun-loving, talented, family behaviorist and the brilliant Boston neurosurgeon. They’d wanted badly to have a family; they’d tried very hard, followed all the biological “rules,” but nothing happened. Then they went in vitro. Several times. Suddenly, Murphy was pregnant. They were elated. Even more elated when they learned that twin boys were heading their way. Stan doted on her every move, her every mood. The love match continued until . . . until the boys were born prematurely. Maternal twins—identical. Rare with in vitro fertilization. The day they found out Stan laughed nervously and asked, “Are you sure they’re mine?”

Needless to say, the bubble of joy burst.

In a postpartum frenzy, Murphy metaphorically kicked him out of the house. It was weeks before they got back together, before Stan admitted he had always been jealous because Murphy was, after all, the most beautiful woman in the whole freaking world, and he had no idea why she’d bothered to marry old, nerdy him.

While Stan was gone, Annie spent hours with Murphy every day in the neonatal unit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. . . every day for the nearly twenty days until both twins were pronounced “out of the woods” and released. Murphy would not cry; only once did she reveal self-pity by saying, “I thought I knew my husband. Even worse, I thought he knew me.”

Annie wondered how sure Kevin really was—really could be—that Taylor hadn’t killed her boyfriend. Maybe, after the trauma with his wife, Kevin didn’t want to deal with reality again. Maybe he thought La-La Land was a better place to live.

As for Annie, she knew she‘d never get close enough to Taylor to voice an educated guess.

Maneuvering the Jeep into Oak Bluffs now, more than halfway to the harbor, Annie wondered if Donna had needed to believe in fairy tales when she’d learned that she was pregnant with Annie. Maybe she’d given Annie up for adoption because she’d convinced herself that Annie’s birth father didn’t want her (or Donna didn’t want him), and that Annie would go to a wonderful home with two wonderful parents who would be able to raise her in a wonderful world—much more wonderful than Donna could have given her back then.

Then Annie realized maybe it was time to ask: about her birth father; about the grandparents she’d never known; about how it happened that she’d been born and then adopted. It might be nice to know something other than that her birth mother had been in the antiques business and that Annie had a half-brother. Maybe, if she knew a little more about her background, she’d ask Lucy to do her genealogy.