He takes a sip of his wine. “Well, you know it was more than just the fact that he was the caretaker here?” June shakes her head, sincere confusion in her eyes. “You don’t know?” Ezra’s words make the space I hang in buzz. “About the affair?” He pauses to study her reaction. She stares back at him blankly. “Between my dad and your mom. It went on for years, apparently.”

June glances over at the scrapbook and doesn’t say anything for several seconds. “I saw something about an affair mentioned in an article, but I just assumed it was small-town gossip.”

“It wasn’t just gossip, June.” His words are blunt, and there’s a trace of anger behind them. It’s obvious that he’s still hurting from all of it.

“I had no idea,” she says, before mechanically lifting her glass and draining every last bit of her wine.

A memory breaks free from the depths and slowly rises to the surface. I questioned my mother about the affair only once. I was thirteen, that age when the mind is naturally drawn to things like love, attraction, and the illicit. When gray areas appear where once everything was black and white. When parents become fallible.

I asked her if she was in love with West. She acted affronted, told me I should be careful of what I accused people of. She said that after everything she’d done for me and my sister, it was just cruel to think so low of her. Something was thrown in there about all the sacrifices she’d made for us girls before she dropped the dishcloth in the sink and retreated to her room.

I followed her, apologizing profusely, as we’d learned to do, but she shut the door in my face. An hour or so later she came out, looking wounded but stoic. She made us a dinner of eggs on toast and somehow managed to get herself dressed and over to the resort for the evening. We didn’t speak about it again.

My suspicions hadn’t come from catching them in the act or anything like that. I’d caught moments of something that, when added up, were hard to dispute. I was the one who roamed the island with a camera round my neck, sitting for hours on a rock hidden by trees so that I could get the perfect shot of a bird or the sunlight—or my mother and her lover. And I’d kept it from June. Believing I was protecting her from something. That she didn’t need to know that side of my mother.

Maybe it was a mistake to do that. In the end, I haven’t protected her from anything. And finding this truth out for the second time feels just as bad as it did the first time.