Mrs. Grendle was home alone. She waved me in without a word. Inside we drank bourbon at the kitchen counter, until her cheeks flushed, and blood vessels like rosy spiderwebs blossomed just above her cheekbones.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” I told her. “I’ve been trying to find out more about my mom. I don’t know. I just thought maybe you—being neighbors for so long—”

I thought, but didn’t say aloud, that I doubted how well she knew my parents even if she thought she knew them intimately. What we think we know about our neighbors is a veneer. Take Stephan and Stephanie, and the black eye, the cut cheek. Those were islanders I’d thought I knew pretty well, actually. But what I’d forgotten to account for was secrets, how secrets are as common as freckles. Perhaps to the rest of the island, Lucas and I looked happy.

No one saw that under the surface we were battling for control of our memories. No one imagined that I was haunted at night by dreams that alternated between drowning in black water and drowning in a kind of terrible desire. And that every time I walked to the landing along the bay, I felt again the wet sand, the fierce wind, his mouth—when what I really wanted was to forget that night. No one looking at me would know that I was trying to unravel the secrets of my mother’s past, and what exactly had happened on the deck of the ferry twenty-nine years ago.

“Your mother was a memorable woman,” Mrs. Grendle said. “Beautiful, and a talker. She was very proud of you kids. You know it’s rare to have twins. It’s special. And she loved being special.”

That was an understatement. “Did she talk much about the baby?” I asked. “The third baby?”

“Oh sure, sometimes. It weighed on her.” Mrs. Grendle herself was talkative now, more than I’d ever seen. She swirled the liquid in her glass and took a slow sip. “Losing a child changes you in unexpected ways, and I know this from experience, but it’s not a story I like to tell. Your mother... One time I overheard her. I was at the table next to her at the Quahog Pit. I heard her telling a stranger, a tourist, that she had a third child, but he lived with another family.”

My stomach seemed to swoop like some seabird on the wind. I felt nauseous. I stared at Mrs. Grendle. What did that mean? A third child who lived with another family. What family? What child?

“The only other child is Baby B, and he drowned.”

“Grief makes us say strange things,” Mrs. Grendle said.

“But that’s not strange, that’s crazy,” I said. “Why would she lie? I don’t understand.”