You would have liked the boys, Shae. They were sweet, both of them. Smart, too. They reminded me of us, a little bit, in so far as what a match they were and how tragic it is. I suppose, to understand what happened to them, it might help if I begin with how we got here.

It all started when Nick came to live with us—except, well, wait. That’s not true, is it? It would have started when Jonah came to live with us—only that’s wrong, too, since technically, the whole mess started before Nick knew we existed—and, to some degree, before Jonah and I met. Forgive me. It’s hard to know where to begin when it’s hard to know how it began.

Jonah is twenty now. He was just a kid when I broke up his family and moved into his house. I don’t blame him for hating me. He had every right, and he was too young to understand how messy his parents’ marriage had been, and anyway, I wouldn’t have wanted that for him. Vanessa was an incredible mother. Jonah lived with her through high school and barely stayed with us. He threw the daddy out with the bilge water, if you will. I think that for Jonah, his father’s choice to leave felt like a punishment, like Robert was saying, You’re not good enough to earn my place in your life. You don’t deserve this happy family, and I was the witch who gave his father the power to disappear.

The thing is, Jonah and I didn’t have a bad relationship because we didn’t have a relationship at all. There was nothing. Then, this past year, something changed. He started opening up a bit, and everything got much better early this summer, when he moved in with us. Proust bridged the gap, if you’ll believe it. I helped Jonah enroll in summer school at Stony Brook, gave him tips on which professors to avoid, that sort of thing. When he realized he’d signed up for a course in which his only text would be the madeleine passage—a whole six weeks of madeleines—he nearly strangled me for suggesting it, but he ended up loving the class and wanting to talk about it, obviously, which (big surprise) led to us facing our own recollections of how things unfolded for our family, which led to us telling our sides of the story, which led to—well, I guess it led to us seeing each other. We got to fix some of what could be fixed, just by broadening our peripheral hindsight. It was extraordinary. We became friends.