It would be cruel to Charlie, Alice realized, hearing that she was the odd man out in the family she loved so much. Alice suddenly felt like crying, too, but she wouldn’t let herself. This scene between her and her mother was almost over. Whatever she’d thought knowing the truth would do for her, it hadn’t. And she wanted to hurt her mother the way she’d been hurt. It was the last bit—the only bit—of real power she had, and she’d use it, even if it meant hurting Charlie, even if it meant hurting herself. She brushed Maggie’s hand away, more roughly than necessary. Said, “No,” again.

As Alice walked into the house, she could hear the sounds of Maggie’s sobs behind her. She kept walking.

Stepping into the entrance hall, Alice was confronted by one of the many portraits that lined the downstairs walls: a Flood girl in a gilt frame. Staring at the face that was staring back at her, Alice could see the resemblance, not just to Richard, but, for the first time, to Camilla, as well. And to herself. Then she blinked, saw that it wasn’t a portrait she was looking at—it was a mirror, the tall cloudy one, the glass inside it not gilt-framed, but gilt-edged. It seemed to Alice, as she stood there, peering at her own reflection, pale against the house’s dim interior, so dim you couldn’t distinguish floor from wall from ceiling, everything an amorphous dark, that she was standing at the edge of the world, and if she didn’t tread carefully, took one false step, she’d fall off it into black nothing.

After a minute or so, Alice walked out the door she’d just walked through, went around to the back.

As Alice climbed the steps to the deck for the second time that day, she wondered how Camilla had found out they were sisters if not from her mother, wondered what had tipped her off. Had she somehow stumbled onto the name of the woman Richard was two-timing her mom with, then connected it with the name of an old girlfriend of Richard’s that her grandmother had let slip at some time or other? (Connected it by first name since Maggie had taken Phil’s last. Even more Sherlock Holmesian of her.) Or had she somehow stumbled onto the name of the woman Richard was two-timing her mom with, then done an Internet search? Maybe when she’d found Maggie, Alice had popped up, too, that old picture in the Globe. Maybe Camilla had studied it—crazy to think that Camilla might have looked at a picture of her with the same intensity as she’d looked at that picture of Camilla—and picked up on the likeness.