“Your sister went hungry for you,” I said, finding it hard to believe that there had ever been a time in my grandmother’s life when she hadn’t considered herself strong. “And you left town and never looked back.”

That got me another almost inaudible intake of air, subtler this time, more controlled.

“I would have brought her with me,” my grandmother said. “I tried. Did she tell you that?”

Ellen hadn’t, but she had said that she didn’t want anyone’s charity—least of all her twin’s. “She didn’t want to come with you,” I surmised.

“She didn’t want to want to, Sawyer. She always hated when I talked about leaving that town, and she hated it when I left. She hated your grandfather. Edward Alcott Taft. Even the sound of his name set her to gnashing her teeth. She hated who I was when I was with him. There are days I’m not sure what she resented more—that I left, or that I offered to pull her out.”

“She doesn’t hate Two Arrows,” I said.

Lillian hesitated. “She should.”

My grandmother had told me, more than once, that I didn’t know what it was really like to be poor. Having been to the town where she’d grown up, I wondered if poverty was the only reason that Lillian had wanted to leave.

I thought about Beth, the woman whose screams we’d heard. Audie’s birth mother. She was my second cousin. Given that our grandmothers were identical twins, genetically, she might as well have been a first cousin.

“Your sister had six kids,” I told Lillian. “She has six kids. Did you know that?”

Did any of them go hungry so that their siblings could eat?

“I did what I could for Ellen’s family, Sawyer. I wish to God she’d let me do more.”

“There must have been a way,” I argued.

“My sister found a way.” Lillian’s voice was flat now. Her face had lost its perfunctory, performative smile. “There was some violence in Two Arrows, years back. It left some gaps in the local… ecosystem.”

Because that wasn’t vague or anything.

“Ellie—Ellen, she filled the gaps. Anything bought or sold in that town, she has a hand in it, and she gets a piece of it.”

Anything, I thought. Like drugs. Or sex. I thought of Beth again. Or babies . . .

“Believe me when I say you do not want to get mixed up in my sister’s business,” Lillian told me. “Now, this is neither the time nor the place . . .” She trailed off. I was getting ready to remind her that she was the one who’d cornered me when I realized why she’d trailed off.

Ana Sofía Gutierrez had arrived.