The weather had turned beautiful. Morning after morning at the breakfast table, while drinking her coffee out of the new mug, Maggie would eye the bright sunshine over the sink. She’d mention taking a walk by the lake. And Mom would beam and say, “Oh, that’s wonderful, honey.” Then: “You can join us.” As if she’d already called the lake but was willing to share.

Four days of this, and Mom never took the hint: Maggie didn’t want to join them. She wanted to be alone.

She knew it was stupid to act like the aunt’s stretch of shoreline could hold only one, two people max, and the first morning, when the dawn had broken over the water without a hint of the previous day’s harsh weather, she had ventured out with them. But she’d slipped back into the house after twenty minutes. She’d felt like an intruder.

Mom and Aunt Wren must have decided to avoid whatever issues they couldn’t agree on, because after that initial tension in the kitchen, they got along fine. Remarkably well, in fact—talking, sprawled side by side on the sand, or walking slowly through the surf, heads down, or in the water, slim sisters wading into a mirror of light and sky.

Maggie mostly stayed in the loft. Under the windows, curled up on the iron-framed bed, she read Aunt Wren’s old gothic romances, not her thing but a distraction.

The books didn’t always help. When the words, rather than marshaling her thoughts, began to fray and untie them, she’d sit up quickly, turn around, press her forehead against the window screen, and find her mother and aunt below, their wind-whipped hair, the waves washing away their footprints in the sand.

Every day, the lake matched the sky in blue, pink, or violet, however the sky was feeling at any particular hour. Every day, the seagulls flew in shattering reels and echoed the whitecaps in flash and color. It was a landscape orchestrated in doubles and rhymes.

And Maggie would slouch down to the bed, leaving the twinning world to the twins, and go back to a novel that, when looked at as yet another example of the romantic-suspense genre, also seemed afflicted with redundancy: the same male lead, brooding and curt, dangerous and private, violent but ultimately tender; the same female protagonist, recklessly inquisitive and full of longing; and the same storm-wracked, gabled Victorian, teetering on a cliff, sinister and beautiful.

With the raucous water and birdcalls and wind sweeping in through the loft windows, Maggie read mechanically. When she finished one book, she promptly started another. She read to blot her mind, to not remember. She read for the settings—the eerie mansions, with their hidden chambers, dark passages, and countless windows. The settings were the real characters—multifaceted, many-eyed monsters. They swallowed their inhabitants. They housed secrets.

Maybe Wren’s cabin did, too. Maggie was getting that impression.