“Most of those heroines were written by men glamorizing the femme fragile in a thinly veiled guise to promote male dominance. And”—my head is pounding; I wish I hadn’t asked—“real women had plenty of reasons to faint, suffering dozens of pregnancies, undiagnosed tuberculosis, and anorexia. And you—” She peers at me from above her glasses. “When was the last time you slept? Ate something? Why weren’t you able to breathe?” She moves to see my face. “The doctor said your lungs need time to heal. And you need to rest.”

“I can breathe fine,” I mutter irritably.

“You said you couldn’t breathe,” my mother says, “right before you passed out.”

“No—” I begin.

“You said, ‘Ich atme nicht.’ I’m not breathing.”

“I said it in German?”

My mother purses her lips. She’s so used to translating from German to English she hasn’t realized she’s done it. She looks at my father. Something passes between them that I don’t quite understand. He gives a tiny shake of his head. And I think of the whispered conversations that defined my childhood, the voices that stopped when I walked into the room, the feeling of something left unsaid.

“What’s happening to me?”

“You know,” my father says, shifting his body away from both of us before standing and walking toward the record player, “when you were little you used to follow me around and bang your head on the floor.”

“What?” I say, more confused now than ever.

“I’d be sitting at my desk,” he runs his fingertips along the records, “and you’d come into my office and start hammering your head against the rug by the door. So, of course, I would rush over, pick you up, and then not get any work done the rest of the afternoon.”

I open my mouth and close it again.

“One day, your mother came home and saw you do it.”

My mother nods.

“I told him to leave the room.”

“I didn’t want to,” my father says reassuringly, “there’s concrete underneath the floors, you know. But the moment I did, you stopped.”

“You just wanted attention,” my mother says.

I have no idea why they’re telling me this. Do they think I passed out from a need for attention?

“Debussy?” he asks my mother.

“I…,” I begin, not sure how to defend myself.

“Did something happen at work?” my father asks, putting the record on.

“They, um…,” I mumble, feeling completely unmoored. “They found the person responsible for the fire at my house.”

They both stare at me. Until now, I’d been hiding my suspicions and letting them believe it was an accident—a frivolous indulgence gone wrong. I’m not sure that my mother ever believed it, but she hasn’t asked.

“Well, that’s good news, isn’t it?” my father says.