Earlier, as we’d driven away from the cape, I’d sat in the passenger’s seat holding a little blue hand mirror, something normal women use for putting on lipstick. I’d used it for the hypnotic effect of looking into my own eyes. Okay, okay, okay, I kept telling myself. And we were okay.

At some point in New Hampshire, my body gave up, too exhausted from two hours of adrenaline to do anything but sleep. I leaned my head back and sank into a tumultuous doze. And when I woke up, I was calm. The highway was still a flash of road signs and trees and other cars, and the sound of it was still the roar of another ocean. And I was still in the center of all that noise and motion. But I was calm. I was my own anchor, I guess.

“I’m okay now,” I’d said to Tuck, amazed, and he’d beamed at me from the driver’s seat.

In the motel late that night, we turned the light off. But I couldn’t sleep. I listened to Tuck breathing. Long after Tuck was asleep, I lay in bed, feeling a terrible thickness around my heart. I looked at Tuck’s face as he slept and felt separated from him by a wide gulf. He was too young, too happy, too beautiful, too optimistic, too good, too twin-less, too much of everything that I wasn’t. The substance around my heart felt like a rubbery denseness. The shadow was there, even there, inside me—that darkness I’d carried away from Colin’s grave.

I lay in the motel bed, listening to Tuck breathing, longing for home, and for Lucas, for my mother and father, for Colin, and for that old life that would never return. Mostly I longed for the old life, with its familiar griefs and those old beautiful fears that seemed quaint now, like things encapsulated in a museum display, not at all like the new fears that gnawed at me like hungry animals.

The town of Lindenberg felt familiar from all the poking around we’d done online. We parked the car downtown and sat there for a few minutes, looking at the sweet, carved signs hanging out in front of shops, bright leaves on the slender trees on the hillside behind the town. I felt tired, gritty eyed, impatient. Maybe just hungry, I thought.

“Where first?” Tuck asked.

We maneuvered through the sunny streets and finally found our way to a diner on the corner. We ordered eggs and toast and coffee, and a young waitress with a kind face, who reminded me of Diane back at Mady’s, served us.