She’d had more than her share of disasters—before she turned five, Cassie had smashed her head open on a cabinet door, consumed a bottle of cough medicine, fallen in the deep end of a pool—but these were matters of distraction, misunderstanding. Accidents. In the case of the near-drowning, she remembered thinking, as she sank deeper below the water, Oh, this again. She could see the tiles at the bottom glistening distractedly before her father fished her out.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to be noticed. Someone—like, a therapist, say, if she allowed herself to afford one—might suggest that she’d had a sublimated desire to be fussed over. But it didn’t feel that way. She was more attached to her father than her mother, even though, or because, like most fathers, hers was much less frequently available than she would have liked. Philip more obviously took after their mother. They were both dark-haired and voluble, chattering constantly about whatever came into their heads. Cassie wasn’t silent, but she often wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say, and thus waited for cues, sometimes long past the point at which they would have arrived, had they been coming. Philip never seemed to have this problem, and she understood on some level that the volume of words he produced was in part what kept any of them in particular from taking on an outsized importance to him. Talking was a form of thinking for him, whereas for her, the activities were related but far from intertwined. Her thoughts more often than not canceled each other out with their contradictions, making it difficult to know what should actually be spoken out loud. And then when she did speak she often found herself saying the opposite of what she’d meant, or at best some muddled approximation of it, and then spent the next minutes or hours reproaching herself for not being more capable of clear expression. Philip and her parents brought it to her attention that she had developed the wisp of an English accent, which no one else in the family had, and she was both proud and self-conscious about this. It was one of many things about which she would feel both proud and self-conscious. When they moved back to “the States,” to Connecticut when she was ten, her accent melted in the summer heat and she sounded like she could be from anywhere.