“Oh honey, it’s okay. We all make mistakes. But I hope you know you can trust me unequivocally now. I won’t do anything like that again. Unless it would keep you out of harm’s way, of course.” She’s covered her eyes with sunglasses, so when I try to make eye contact, all I see is myself reflected back, my face tiny and pinched in the mirrored lenses. I want to ask her what she means by that, what harm. But she’s getting up, shepherding Lola and Jordan out from the sprinklers, saying it’s time for lunch.

It’s not until the kids are toweled off and we’re headed to a diner for lunch that I realize I no longer have the bracelet, that Anneliese must have slipped it into her own purse, back among her belongings. And maybe it’s hers now anyway. Twenty-odd years is a long time to hold on to a possession and do nothing with it. Besides, my family’s petty jealousies aren’t her fault; she couldn’t have known the shockwaves that taking the bracelet would have caused.

Except. Except, as I help Lola squirt ketchup on her fries and Jordan swings his legs, kicking them against the booth, there’s a splinter of doubt lodged at the very edge of my mind, a painful pinprick of uncertainty that causes me to over-squirt, leaving a mess of Heinz on the tabletop instead of on Lola’s plate.

Because that bracelet disappeared right around the time Georgia was leaving the house, if my dad had the chronology correct. And that casts a shadow on the truth, Anneliese’s truth, in a way that has me stumbling over her story, Dad’s story, the history of my family, so many times that by the end of the day I’ve lost track. And the splinter has tunneled deeper. A flash of physical soreness tightens across my temples, my suspicion metastasizing into something achingly real.

By the time I get home, I feel like hiding, burrowing deeply into a sweatshirt and staying in there. I put lo-fi music on and eat pho cross-legged in bed, splattering curry broth all over my duvet.

There’s a pressure behind my eyes, and before I can help it, tears are leaking down and into my mouth, snot dangling out of my nose and sliding through my lips. I haven’t cried in so long that instead of feeling like a release, all I get is the dull throb of an oncoming headache, the kind I’d grown so used to before the summer.