“But how did it happen? I mean, how could he possibly go over the railing?” My throat felt like it was twisting shut. I made a little gasp.

“You’re not doing yourself any favors worrying over it,” Mrs. Grendle said.

“And my parents? Were they—they must have been—I mean did they blame themselves?”

“They went into the house and didn’t come out,” Mrs. Grendle said. “They just closed the doors. But by summer they were okay. Not the same, you understand, but they could live with themselves.”

“Your mother lost her looks,” Mr. Grendle said. “She came out of it ugly.”

“It was the look of someone who’s seen the shadow,” Mrs. Grendle said. “I’m sure that’s why they never told you. They were trying to protect you.”

When I talked to Jim, he looked at me in surprise. “I assumed you knew,” he said. “You never talked about it, so I thought it was too painful to bring up.”

I asked Elijah West to help me find old copies of the Island Sun or the Cape Cod Paper, something that might talk about a ferry accident, a baby’s death. He showed me how to use the microfiche in the basement.

“It’s kind of old-fashioned,” he said. “But we have every single issue cataloged. You won’t miss anything.”

“It would have been January,” I said. “And really, I’m looking for an obituary, or any information about an investigation.”

Elijah looked at me curiously. “About a baby? That’s not the kind of thing you like to hear about, ever. Even in the past.”

“My brother,” I said.

“Oh Christ,” he said. “I never knew.”

“It seems like we’re the only two people who didn’t know. The whole island knows more about it than I do.”

The first thing I found was an article about my father. Or not so much about him, but he was mentioned in it. It was about the college where he worked in Boston, about how he was resigning following the birth of triplets. There was something profound even about seeing this in print, the reality of the three of us. There it was in black and white. We had existed, all of us. Not that I had doubted reality—I mean how could I? Our lives had been tainted permanently by the birth and death of Baby B. But that reality had felt for so long like an internal thing, a legend, a story, a private truth.