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.

“Poor Georgina,” I said. “No wonder she stayed away.”

“And we never bothered to come find her,” Nick said, rubbing at his face. “I feel awful. She had grandchildren who treated her like a weird old bat. I can count on one hand the number of times we spoke.”

“We wouldn’t have if we’d known,” Freddie said.

“But that’s just it,” Nick said. “Someone could have encouraged us to reach out to her, to make sure she had any semblance of a relationship with us. Gran or Great-Gran could have found a way for us to know her. But they never did.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Her reclusiveness seems like a choice. Maybe it hurt too much for her to be any closer to you than she had to be.”

“So many choices, and none of them ours,” he said.