That first night they’d met, Ever’s eyes had taken her in. He’d nodded his head at her, so slightly. A smile sun-beamed out from his face, melting her icy body into rain. On Ever’s roof, when the stars shot across the sky, she had not wished for Cyrus. He was gone, but Ever was there. Ever, who had held her in her sadness. She had moaned with sadness into his ear, but also with fierce, carnal relief.

Ever hit the remote to quiet the music. “Talk to me,” he said. But he still wouldn’t look at her. He fingered some stuffing that had broken through a tear in the brown leather, and she thought of the couch in Seth and Nephy’s living room, the couch Izzy had sat on with Cyrus the night they met and many, many other nights since then.

“We all had different fathers,” Izzy said. Because at least—that. She wondered if she disgusted Ever, sleeping with her half-brother. “Cult members. They didn’t know about each other. My mom and Nephy’s must have just gone along with it when our dads brought us home. Didn’t tell anyone.”

“Why?” Ever asked.

“Maybe they didn’t want to lose their men. That’s what Sky said. Maybe they hadn’t been able to have children of their own.”

Sky mentioned miscarriages, and Leanne had implied the same thing when Izzy lost her baby. But out here by the Sea they all die.

Seth’s mother had left when she found out what her husband Rick had done. Only Cyrus’s mother didn’t know, had thought Cyrus was an orphan, not her husband’s child.

“What about those other kids?”

“Sky had four more children by the red-haired guy from Bombay Beach. At least they know they’re—that they’re siblings.” Izzy felt nauseous and leaned forward, pressing her hands against her belly.

Somehow—perhaps with the help of Nephy’s father, Otis, or the photographer Clay Wade—Sky had given the tiara to Nephy when she was a girl and then taken it back to give to Nephthys, the little red-haired girl in Bombay Beach.

Cyrus and Nephy had betrayed Izzy and Seth, but it all started with Sky. She had damaged all four children from the beginning, hidden their identities, traumatized them in ways they had never quite been able to understand. She had birthed them because she believed that, somehow, they would play out the myth.

The police questioned Sky in connection with Cyrus’s murder, but they had released her due to lack of evidence. All she had done was give birth to four siblings, had them adopted, the cops said. All she had done was to perform rituals in her home.