“Father’s not the heir,” Freddie blurted.

“And neither am I,” Nick said. His hands were shaking. “None of this is ours. This whole life, all of it, everything we’ve been raised to do and say and believe, has been a lie. Our lives are a fucking lie. Our past. Our present. Our future. All lies. And we have babies coming who will make the lie bigger and bigger.”

His breathing sped up again. I made a move toward him but he waved me off, inhaling a huge, slow stream of oxygen. One of the twins nudged me in the ribs. My hand went to the spot where I felt it, and I thought about what Nick had said. This wasn’t just about the brothers; this unraveled everything about all of our lives. I wanted to put it back in the box, and cursed the nosiness that had caused me to dig into a life that was none of my business. No wonder Georgina was a hoarder. She was burying the truth of her life in stuff. She had probably hoped it would fill the space left by the things she had lost.

Freddie turned his face into one of the floor pillows and yelled into it. Then he jerked away. “This is their little place, isn’t it?” he gasped. “Father might have been conceived in this very room. I can’t. This is madness. Are we absolutely certain…?”

He pulled the box over to his lap and started sorting through the knickknacks Nick and I had already seen. Georgina had hung on to everything, from shards of paper scribbled with hasty words of longing to lengthier missives written in Henry’s sloping cursive, waxing rhapsodic about how long he’d loved Georgina from afar, and how agonizing it was to play out their dreams in hiding, how they dreamed of a different future.

It brought new clarity to the collection of family photos. In many of the early ones, Henry stood between his wife and his lover, all three of them smiling, Eleanor more primly and Georgina as if she held a dazzling secret. Which, of course, she did. I imagined her and Henry’s pinkies secretly touching, connecting them, the way Nick and I would sometimes try to do. But in photographs after Richard, they were as far apart as possible; Eleanor’s smile a bit more assured, Georgina’s strained and missing its light.

“Right,” Freddie finally said. “We’re pretty bloody certain.”

Nick was staring at a small black-and-white photo of Henry and Georgina, close up, slightly blurry—the focal inaccuracies of trying to take, in essence, a selfie in the non-digital age—in which they blissfully nuzzled. “These are my grandparents,” he said. “Imagine what would’ve happened if…”

He picked up one leather baby shoe, which must have belonged to Richard. I tilted my head back and looked at the books. Of course she kept all her girlhood favorites hidden away up here. She’d saved them in secret for him. Or for someday. My free hand drifted to my belly as I tried to imagine what it would be like to hand the twins over to Daphne to raise, knowing that I would have to pretend for the rest of my life that they were not mine, that they didn’t grow in my body, under my heart; that I hadn’t built them out of love for their father and brought them into this world myself. Thinking about it made my skin sear.