I think of the university’s slogan and its secrets. People always remember Athena as the goddess of wisdom, but they forget her prowess in battle—that when she sprang from Zeus’s head she was also dressed in armor. A fierce warrior with a strong sense of justice, Athena punished those who disobeyed her with madness.

Athens could accommodate many sins. But this doubling of Jay and the simultaneous erasure of Colin was wrong. It threatened the fine fabric holding the city together. Colin felt it—that trembling, stretching, breaking—as he put his foot to the pedal. Did Jay?

I blink at the crosswalk.

Something tells me he did. In the end.

The students are in the middle of final exams. Wrapped in brightly colored scarves and bent over notebooks, they cluster together on the front steps of buildings and whisper their fears of failure in the same breath as their plans for the winter holidays.

My mother’s office door is closed, but the light’s on. I tap twice before I open it.

“Students normally wait until I tell them to come in,” she says dryly. Her feet are up on her desk, a stack of papers in her lap and a pen to her mouth. “You know, no matter how many times I tell them that unnecessary modifiers are a personal pet peeve, I still have papers full of ‘really’s, ‘very’s, and ‘extremely’s. How is what the character really means any different from what he means?”

I shrug. No matter what she says, she loves this part. Really loves it, I think.

“Mom,” I say.

It must be something in my voice, because there’s a sudden caution in her gray eyes as they focus on my face.

How can I explain it to her? The dreams? The voices? The feeling she knows and has just been waiting for me to ask?

“How do I know German?”

She sighs and pulls her feet off her desk, straightening in her chair as she opens the top drawer and withdraws a photograph.

It’s worn around the edges and smudged with fingerprints. She doesn’t look it at, just hands it, wordlessly, to me.

I stare at it for a long time, not understanding.

I recognize my mother instantly. She’s young. Her hair is auburn even though the photo has yellowed with age. She stands in the center with a broad smile, but her face is drawn and tired. My father must be behind the camera. But the rest doesn’t make sense. I look up.

“This,” she says, placing a finger on the photo, “is you.”

I blink and stare hard at the picture. I’ve seen a similar photo. Just once. My mother holding me on the sofa. Smiling in that weary way of hers. But here, my mother isn’t holding just me. She’s holding two babies in polka-dotted gowns.