But he followed me back to the house. We rummaged as quietly as possible in the shed, then walked to the graveyard in the rain, each of us carrying a shovel. I had a trowel in my raincoat pocket as well. I was glad it was raining—it would make the earth soft, and somehow make us less likely to be discovered, hidden by the soft pattering, hidden by the blur.

The only light we had was Tuck’s key chain flashlight. There was no moonlight. Even so, our eyes seemed to adjust to the darkness, once we found the grave. Tuck shone his light on the headstone. He touched the letters. Son. Brother. I stood above him.

“This will kill the lady’s slippers,” I said.

“Well?” he said. “What do you want to do?”

“Kill them, I guess,” I said and stuck my shovel into the earth.

Besides swimming in the Providence River with my freshman year friend Mary, I was basically a rule follower. I wasn’t prone to wild abandonment of reason. I didn’t follow my passion. I didn’t dance like no one was watching. I didn’t revere risk. I didn’t need to! My home was on an island; I was brought up by a possibly insane mother, a pathologically shy brother, and a father who might as well have been absent. I was haunted by my dead brother. There were uncertainties of weather and tide to contend with in my life, and there was the unpredictability of strong personalities touched by grief.

Those things were all around me, so I stayed still, and quiet. That was who I became. Lydia, still and quiet. I didn’t act, I was acted upon. I never would have gone into the Providence River, except that Mary convinced me to. I never would have gone to college in the first place, except that a teacher told me she could imagine me there, in Providence, and that was enough for me. I never would have come home except that my mother needed me.

But now I had made a decision wildly uncharacteristic of me and I was acting on it. I almost laughed, struck suddenly by the ridiculousness of what I was doing. And why was this important to know? What would it tell me? That my mother was a liar. I knew that already. That Cole was my brother after all. I didn’t want to know that ever. I had made a decision all right, and it seemed like it might turn out to be a very bad decision in the end. But I couldn’t stop now. I found my hands shaking as I gripped the shovel. I felt a deep hunger to know what was under the earth.