My heart beat ferociously. The old life receded into darkness. The new life raced toward me. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. As if thinking about him could prevent the new life from gathering speed. The letter was still in my pocket. I hadn’t said a word about it when I’d had the chance, just fled to my bedroom like some frightened child. And why? Because he’d touched my leg and said I was beautiful. It was different when he was a stranger. The things you want from strangers are tiny things, disposable.

I’d thought that the attraction I’d felt when I saw him that first night had disappeared the moment we began to pretend he might be our lost—and returned—brother. But the desire was still there; I felt it when he touched me, felt its delicate leaves and roots, alive and growing somewhere in my rib cage. Now the things I wanted from him were complex and frightening, a whole jungle. I wanted the secrets he held. The past, the future. I took the letter out and smoothed it against the dark window. I read the words again and again.

When I finally slept, I dreamed of my mother.

“What do you want?” I asked.

She led me into the hallway. She had lit a hundred candles. Incense burned in a little clay pot she kept on her bedside table, with markings around the rim like bird tracks, something small, a wren. I could hardly see her through the smoke of the incense, with the candles winking everywhere.

“Where are you?” I said.

She was young again, younger than I’d ever known her. Beautiful, animated, alive.

“You’re worrying for nothing,” she said bitterly. “She is still alive.”

And I woke up.

Graininess of dawn. Milky fragrance. A door closing downstairs. Footsteps in the hallway. A shadow in the doorway.

“Where is it?” Cole said. I scrambled out of bed, disoriented. I wasn’t dreaming this time. Cole was standing furiously in the doorway, his eyes black, shining with rage, or tears.

His shirt was buttoned wrong, as if he’d dressed in a hurry. Somehow this fact, the buttons askew, the small white flash of skin showing where they failed to line up, compounded my sense of disorientation, the feeling that I was spinning, that all around me the world was blurred beyond recognition. There was something so starkly beautiful about his face. I thought with profound sadness of the bones of his skull, right there, just under the surface.

“Were you in my room?” he demanded. “Did you take a letter? I want my letter back.”

“It’s from my mother,” I said. “So it’s not yours. It’s mine.”

“Give it to me,” he said.

“What does it mean?” I demanded. “How did you know her?”

“Show me the letter,” he said.