“Yeah, I’m sure,” he says, studying the box in his hands. “A little while after my dad disappeared, my mom and I were cleaning out his work shed. She pulled this down from a shelf. At the time, I was in this total ‘don’t throw anything of his out’ stage. I still thought he was coming back. Anyway, my mom saw what was inside and started crying. She said something about the girl—‘if it hadn’t been for the girl,’ or something like that—then threw it in the garbage and stormed out, calling my dad a bastard. As soon as she was gone, I took it out of the garbage and hid it away in that trunk.” He holds up the photo of the two of us fishing. “I think mostly because of this.”

The girl. The words roll around my head like a marble in a metal bucket, loud and loose. I’m the girl; Willa told me so herself. The one in the photos in the cigar box hidden away in West’s shed; the one that somehow made West’s betrayal unforgivable to Willa. Willa used the girl like an exclamation point every time she talked about the secrets kept by my mother and West. Suddenly it becomes so clear. I was the greatest betrayal of all—a daughter born from their affair.

And the photo of me, West, and Ezra holding up our wood carvings—West and I stare out at the camera with the same crystal-blue eyes. That’s what Willa meant the first day I saw her when she said I had my dad’s eyes.

The cigar box—it’s not Ezra’s shrine to me. It was his dad’s shrine to his daughter. My mother would have given him those photos, that poem, the lock of hair. Items to remember me by when we weren’t at Avril Island, to mark my growth through the years, times he missed out on.

“June.” Ezra reaches out and takes my arm. “Are you okay?”

I pull away. A wave of thick nausea rises up. I rush from the room, making it to the bathroom just in time to empty my stomach, the bourbon burning on its way back out.

I hear Ezra rushing down the hallway toward the bathroom, so I quickly kick the door shut with one foot. He pounds on it, demanding to know if I’m all right, but all I can do is pull a towel from the towel bar and shove it into my mouth to stop the scream.