Back on the highway, they pass a sign announcing they are in Lutsen, and Kate suddenly knows where they are. They used to take the girls skiing here when they were young, sometimes with their neighbours from Victor Street – March breaks and long weekends spent in cozy log cabins in front of crackling fireplaces, with hot chocolate for the kids and warm spiced wine for the grown-ups. The kids would fall asleep exhausted in their beds at night, all windburnt cheeks and aching muscles and quietly throbbing hearts. The year that they installed the outdoor hot tub, Kate remembers running with her daughters through the snow in their bathing suits before submerging themselves in the scalding-hot water, steam rising off their frozen skin as they dared each other to do it again. One year – the first year with the boy, when Walter refused to come with them – it was so warm out that they had a barbecue, the boy flipping steaks on the deck of their chalet in his shorts and clunky winter boots. Another year, they got snowed in for two days and all five of them played an ancient game of Trivial Pursuit that no one knew any of the answers to, until the girl’s mother got fed up and threw the game board into the fire.

Sometimes Kate wonders, did these things really happen, or is she just imagining them? How can she be expected to trust her memories when they are as slippery as fish in her hands? Sometimes they seem too good to be true, too picture-perfect, all this beautiful familial bliss. She knows there must have been dark times, but they are harder to recall from beneath the debris of her ramshackle mind, so she usually gives up trying. Maybe everything she remembers is false, anyway. Maybe her memories have all been stolen and replaced with fake ones, and the ones that can’t be replaced simply disappear.

—

Kate had always assumed that after they left Brighton they would return to London and Miss Featherton’s, but Lydia had other plans. “I’ve always wanted to see Paris in the spring,” she said one rainy afternoon as they sat in the pool hall below their room, playing cards and drinking terrible coffee.

“It sounds wonderful,” Kate said, her heart breaking into a thousand pieces, imagining trudging back through the streets of London by herself. “I’m sure you’ll have a great time.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Don’t even pretend you’re not coming with me,” she said. “You’re the only one who can understand my terrible French.”