Looking surprised, Mrs. Snowden said, “I think so. I’m almost sure I remember which issue I pulled. Have a seat. I’ll be back.”

Alice sat on a red stool sized for a child in the far corner, her mind curiously blank while she waited. She didn’t know how much time had passed—one minute or thirty—before Mrs. Snowden returned, bearing a single sheet of paper.

“It was on microfiche,” Mrs. Snowden said. “I made a copy for you. It’s fifty cents. I supposed I should’ve asked before I—”

“No, no,” Alice said, fumbling around the bottom of her bag for loose change, “I’m glad you did. Thank you.”

At last she came up with two lint-covered quarters, handed them to Mrs. Snowden. She looked down at the sheet and began to read. The announcement of the marriage of Richard Bowdoin Flood III to Martha Barrett Briggs on October 20 appeared pretty standard to her eye: age, educational background, and career aspirations of bride and groom; location of ceremony; name of officiant; a few ancestor-worship facts; etc., etc. She scanned it twice to see if any detail leapt out at her. None did. It had to be the date, then, that was significant, specifically the year. So, Richard and Martha had led Camilla to believe that they’d wed one year earlier than they in fact did. Now why would they do that? To what end? And then Alice remembered the framed birth certificate hanging in Mrs. Flood’s living room. Camilla was born on March 28 of the following year, the same year she, Alice, was born, which meant that Martha was already pregnant with Camilla when she walked down the aisle with Richard.

So it was a shotgun wedding.

That was the big secret, the big scandal—that Martha had let herself get knocked up slightly ahead of schedule? So what? Alice had done the math; her parents’ wedding was shotgun, too. This wasn’t the eighteen hundreds. Plenty of couples had families without even bothering to tie the knot, ever. Did anyone care, even in prim-and-proper WASP land, that the bride and groom had seen each other naked before the ceremony? Or, an alternative theory suddenly presenting itself to her, did Richard and Martha fudge the date not to protect themselves but to protect Camilla? Were they afraid she’d be hurt to discover that she was an accident, that she’d feel unwanted or, worse, guilty, like her arrival had forced them into entering a union that they otherwise might not have? But not only couldn’t Alice imagine Camilla ever being so fragile, or prone to such woe-is-me thinking, Alice couldn’t imagine anyone, Camilla’s parents especially, ever perceiving her as such. Maybe, then, the date wasn’t what Camilla was looking for after all. Maybe that was simply what she told Mrs. Snowden, a cover for something else.