I looked up from the article, reimagining the night once again. Baby and mother. That doesn’t happen, I thought. You’d have to climb onto the railing to tumble over.

My father was quoted in the article. “‘We’re devastated,’ said William Moore, husband of Cecily. ‘We’ve lost our son, but we’re trying to count our blessings. I could have lost my wife as well, but she’s still here today. She is alive.’”

She is alive. The last line chilled me. It had to be a coincidence that the quote matched what I’d seen written in Cole’s notebook. Still, the hair on my neck stood on end. It seemed incredible that no one on the island had told me the story before. Hadn’t any of the kids we’d gone to school with heard the story from their parents? How had we been protected from the truth for so long? The truth was beginning to seem like a strange and duplicitous thing. There were truths inside truths, many-headed truths, infinities of truths. Everything I knew to be true about my mother, for instance, might have come into being after we were born, after Colin died. She had lived forty years before we were alive. I had known her for only twenty years, I realized, less time than I’d known everyone else on the island.

At home, there was a fire in the fireplace. Cole was reading on the couch; Lucas was tying flies at his desk. I wanted to tell them the whole story. It was eating at me, a nightmare. And telling the nightmare is the best power over it. But when I saw them, cozy like that in the living room, something like déjà vu swept through me, and then a terrible tingling, the sensation of rain in my head. For a moment I couldn’t tell what I was feeling, and then I knew it was anger, a thousand points of anger like the pinpricks of fast falling rain. The fire, the furniture, the room, the house, none of it felt like mine anymore.

How had he managed, after all, to take my home from me like this? Seeing him so at ease, sitting where I should be sitting, reading a book from our bookcase, I realized that bank or no bank, refinancing or not, the house was more his than mine now.

That night I dreamed of the seals standing sternly at the foot of my bed. They struck their flippers together.

“What do you want?” I asked them, afraid.

“You know,” they said.

I woke with a start. My bedroom door opened and Cole stood there.

“What do you want?” I cried.

“You know,” he said.

I woke with a thundering heart.