“I didn’t own the place then,” he said helplessly. “I don’t have records. I know about it the same way you know about it, Lydia. Just heard about it. Linda cried when she found out, I do remember that. We were twenty-five. We weren’t even married yet.”

I found out that there was no medical examiner on the island, but someone from the cape handled all our deaths. When I called, though, it turned out that the medical examiner who would have been working at the time had died himself twenty years ago.

There was one funeral home on the island, and it doubled as a photography studio—specializing in passport photos. It was run by Jonathan Day, who I’d gone to school with. He’d taken over the place from his parents a year ago. He’d never been a likable guy, but things had gotten worse since I’d last seen him. His large face was expressionless. It was as though he were incapable of smiling. He stared at me morosely across a tiny desk in the corner of the room, showing no sign of recognition.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m Lydia. Lydia Moore.”

“I know who you are,” he said. I looked at him and thought, embalmed. I wondered why he didn’t get a bigger desk. His knees seemed to bump against this one. I remembered that his mother had been very small. Maybe it had never occurred to him that he could use a different desk, the way we didn’t change the things our parents had arranged in our house.

I explained what I was looking for. Even when I said the words brother, and baby, and dead, the expression on his face didn’t waver.

“You can buy the records,” he said when I was done.

“Buy them? Like with money?”

“Yes, with money.”

“Are you sure you can’t just give them to me? I mean, my parents probably paid for the funeral arrangements in the first place. So.”

“Five hundred dollars,” he said.

“Are you kidding me?”

“No,” he said.

“I literally want to know one thing—was there a body?”

“If we were involved there was probably a body. Otherwise why would we be involved? But who knows? If you want to know for sure, you can buy the records.”

“You can go to hell,” I said.

I found Cole in his bedroom. I stood in the doorway. He was in jeans and a gray T-shirt, barefoot, handsome. I remembered the sound of that terrible poem, the feeling of him holding me in place. I thought about the snow globe in his hands, and inside the transparent dome our house, and in the doorway a Lydia and a Lucas trapped under glass, forever. Tiny brother, tiny sister.