Then my phone pings with a message. I figure it’s Dinah but then I see the name and almost spit out my mouthful of coffee.

Oliver turns around, spatula in hand, but he’s just a figure in my peripheral vision as I open the message from my sister and stare at the screen.

Are you serious, Gillian? OCD?

I swallow.

Oliver’s behind me, reading over my shoulder.

“Damn!” he says. “Gillian, just call her. You need to have an actual conversation with her, stat.”

I hesitate, then hit Call.

It rings, then stops. Another message comes in.

I’m sorry, Gillian.

Three dots flicker.

Mom will be there soon.

I stare at the screen, and behind me I can tell Oliver is too.

“What the hell?”

“‘Mom will be there soon?’”

Oliver shakes his head and looks out the window.

“Well, she wasn’t lying, at any rate.”

I follow his eyes, and when I look out the window, I see Mom in the driveway. She’s hesitating, standing very still, as though she’s tempted to just do a one-eighty and march away again.

I go down the hallway, swing the door open.

“Mom,” I say. “Abigail texted me. What is this? What’s going on?”

*

Mom sits at the kitchen table, a mug of coffee in front of her. She looks, well, she looks positively rumpled, and Mom never looks rumpled.

“Sam’s upstairs?” she says. I nod.

“Asleep. Mom…what is it? Is somebody sick?”

She shakes her head. Glances around at Oliver, who’s still standing by the stove.

“Should I…go?” he says, but Mom shakes her head again.

“Stay with Gillian.”

My stomach turns. Bad news. Not that I doubted, by now, that it would be. And not just bad news: I see it in the way she holds herself, in the way her eyes move. This is a confession.

Mom puts her hands around the cup of coffee, looks up at me. Her eyes are calm, now, almost defiant. “Your father and I…we made a decision in a very different world, Gillian. We did what we thought was best. We never dreamed she would find out.”

Those alarming, extraordinary words hang in the air.

“Find out what?” I say, my own voice sounding like a stranger’s.

Mom swallows.

“Your sister’s gone to Florida, Gillian—” Mom takes a breath, looks at Oliver, and then back at me. “To meet her birth mother.”

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

My head's spinning. The words don’t make sense. Of course they don’t.

Your sister’s birth mother.

“Abigail…” I have to push my voice out of my chest; it’s stopped working. “Abigail’s adopted?” And then a new thought, like a wave crashing on top of the last one.

“Wait: am I adopted?”

Mom shakes her head.

“Not you, Gillian. Your sister, yes.”

Those six words ring in the air. Splitting our world into shards like a cracked mirror.