I knew we were. Even wrapped in the shadow the way I’d been since the night in the cemetery, I felt that as long as we stayed in this hotel room we were safe. We could make a life here, Tuck and me. I looked up at him. I wondered what would happen if I touched him now, kissed him at midnight, took my clothes off and stood naked in front of him. I wanted to obliterate everything I was feeling, and fucking seemed like the best and easiest way. Fucking obliterated the mother, and the girl in the bed, and Cole and Anthony, and Lucas, and the lighthouse, and the candles, and the moth, and the shadow. Only no—I knew nothing so ordinary as fucking could have any effect whatsoever on the shadow, which was not a warm and human thing like sex.

And then from under the shadow’s curtain, I felt something else, something tugging at my consciousness, like a memory. Like the strains of a song I was trying to place. What was it?

“You know what?” I said to Tuck. “Something’s wrong with Lucas. I just, I don’t know, I feel it. It’s a twin thing. I need to go home.”

“It’s a five-hour drive,” Tuck said. “And there’s no ferry until morning. We can’t go home tonight.”

“There’s something wrong with him,” I said, suddenly sure, the certainty like a dense black pit in the center of my chest. “I always thought I’d know, and now I know. What should I do, call the police?”

“You should relax,” Tuck said.

“Shut up. I can’t.”

I dialed the island police, but no one answered. I dialed again, longing to hear George’s voice. Something’s wrong, I would say. Again? he would say sounding bored. It was his boredom I longed for, his reassurance that things were the same as they’d ever been.

“George!” I said, when he finally answered. “It’s Lydia. You have to do something for me. Go over to the house and make sure Lucas is okay, George...No, I’m not there. I’m—I’m out of town.”

For once in his life, George did what he said he was going to do. When I called the police station thirty minutes later, he said he’d talked to Lucas and everything was fine.

“Everything is not fine,” I said to Tuck.

I went into the bathroom and locked the door and looked at my face in the mirror for a long time. I turned on the bathwater, and as the water ran I stared at my eyes in the mirror. My eyes were my mother’s eyes, my brother’s eyes.