Now the baby has purple and pink streaks in her hair. Why did her mother let her do that? She always had such beautiful hair, shiny and straight and jet black, like her father, Kate supposes. Not much of her mother in her looks, although they have the same temperament. The same incessant need for attention, the same volatile temper when she didn’t get it. Kate can remember how, as a child, the girl’s mother would follow her twin sister around, begging her to play, flying into a rage when it became clear her sister preferred to be left alone. One time she bit her sister’s shoulder, another time she threw her typewriter out the window, where it shattered against the trunk of one of the red pines growing next to the house. As she grew older, she got in trouble – partying, mostly, promiscuity, breaking curfew, even getting arrested, once, for public indecency of all things – coming out of it all relatively unscathed. Until she got pregnant. The kind of trouble you can’t come out of unscathed.

All this acting out, and for whose benefit? Kate wonders. Did we not give her enough love? Has she passed on this longing to her own daughter through her blood and bone, or through her words and actions? The other two, this one’s sisters, they have each other, and Kate is sure their young brother will know loneliness unlike anything any of them can imagine. But this one – she is still only a child, yet she has already been arrested. Where will this legacy take her? Where is it taking them now?