Soon my arms and legs and the sides of my ribs felt like they were on fire, and I tried to scratch them but found that my fingers were getting clumsy and my head was starting to swim.

“Here’s the part you probably can’t understand,” she said. “I don’t blame you, Margot. I blame the world. We live in a world where nothing is sacred. Children don’t honor their elders. Families don’t honor their ancestors, their traditions. Everything is cheap now. Everything is worthless.”

I swayed, and she put an arm around my waist and began to walk, leading me farther along the edge of the water.

“Agatha is a lot like you, actually. I think she’s had quite a setback, influenced by you and your poor behavior. I’d hoped I could begin her recovery by Christmas, but now it seems like it’ll have to be next summer. Or longer. So you see what you’ve done to her—after claiming to be her friend.”

The inky blackness of the pond water seemed to be listening . . . waiting.

“Agatha has been a worry to me since she was seven,” she said. “But girls always are, I suppose. I should have been a boy. When I was born, my father wouldn’t speak to my mother for a month. I don’t blame him. This isn’t the natural role for a woman. We’re too soft, too tenderhearted.”

I made a sound.

“That’s impolite,” she snapped. “If I’m not those things, it’s because I never had the luxury to be. It’s because everything always rested on me. And no matter what I did, it was never good enough. My father was hard on me—he was never hard on Lily; he loved her. She had an independent spirit, he said. She never cared about saying the right thing or believing the right thing—she insisted on having her own way. I wasn’t like her. I cared too much about things he didn’t value. But he should have. Behavior, history, dignity. That is the framework on which everything else is built.”

Even in my state of confusion, I thought: She’s wrong. Those things aren’t any kind of framework. They’re window dressing, at best. My mother never cared about that kind of thing, and she was twenty times the mother (and human) that Laura could have ever hoped to be.

We came to a small footbridge that passed over a place where the pond narrowed slightly. Laura braced me more carefully there, watching out for my footing on the rough boards.

“I tried to give you a chance. You could have had a place here, if you had behaved. If you had known your place.” She looked right into my eyes. “Goodbye.”

And then she shoved me backward off the bridge.

I plunged into the cold, dark water, and I’m not going to lie—