Thoughts immediately began to pinball around Alice’s skull. Obviously Camilla had cottoned on to Richard and Maggie’s affair. She must’ve wanted to warn Alice that her life as she knew it was about to end. But why had she wanted to warn only Alice? Why not Alice and Charlie? Camilla and Charlie would have had just as much in common as Camilla and Alice. It seemed strange that she’d singled Alice out, decided she connected more with her than Charlie without having actually met either girl. Especially considering the dig she got in about Alice’s jeans. (Okay, so they were sort of momish, but Maggie had sent in an old photo to the Globe from freshman year, and Alice had long since gotten rid of them.) Or maybe she was going to write Charlie separately and just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Alice was, after all, the older sister, and so was first on the list. Why, though, had the letter never been mailed? Camilla must’ve meant to mail it, otherwise why preserve it? Why not just throw it out? And when was it written? There was a date, Alice saw, at the top of the page. She gasped a little when she squinted, made out the numbers:

The day Camilla visited the Serenity Point Public Library, a week before Martha died.

Alice leaned her back against the headboard, waited as her brain connected the dots. So what must’ve gone down was something like this: the trip to the periodicals room confirmed something for Camilla. Maybe Alice was wrong about Camilla’s not being prone to woe-is-me thinking. Maybe learning that Richard and Martha’s wedding had been the result of a birth control mishap told her that they’d never truly been in love, which explained how her father came to be involved with another woman. (Camilla was, by all accounts, a sophisticated, wised-up girl, but even the sophisticated can be sentimental when it comes to their parents’ relationship.) In any case, it confirmed something for her. She was now certain that the affair she’d somehow managed to uncover wasn’t just a fling, that Richard and Maggie were a couple for the long haul. She started to contact Alice to give her a heads-up. But then, the next day, her mom’s health, which seemed to be improving, took a sudden turn for the worse—and a turn for the way worse a week after that. Maybe once her mom died she was too distracted and grief-stricken to deal with envelopes and zip codes and stamps and all that. Or maybe once her mom died she regarded warning Alice as pointless, a marriage between Richard and Maggie inevitable, a foregone conclusion, so she shoved the letter in one of her schoolbooks, forgot about it. Alice let out a frustrated sigh. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe, maybe, maybe—she was drowning in a sea of them.