It’s June, nine weeks after Billy’s arraignment. The weather has shifted again. Summer is here, and humidity has descended like wet fog in New Haven, where I’m living full-time. Here, far from the chaos, I spend entire days not speaking to a soul. I’m free of parents, of brothers. Of men. I’m not oblivious to men, just uninterested. Most important, I’m anonymous. No one knows I’m the “adopted sister” of “accused rapist” or “rapist runner” Billy Quinn. The truth may eventually come out, but for now, I carry my brother the way I carry my other secrets: one self facing the world, the other shrouded in darkness.

I will tell you one sacred secret: I look like an ordinary woman. But inside I have a well of shame that’s as deep as I am tall. I’m an orphan. My father is dead. My mother, also dead, was a drunk. But my shame isn’t that Rachel drank. It was that she gave me away, quickly, easily, no looking back.

Why? I ask Lawrence. Why did she do it?

Rachel was ill, he tells me. Rachel was weak.

But to me, only one answer makes sense. I’m damaged goods. Too damaged to want, too damaged to keep. The truth, of course, is nuanced, but to a small child, distinctions are meaningless. One day she was my mom, the next day she was gone.

The half-life of a daughter’s grief is equal to the length of time she spent with her mother multiplied by the rest of her life. I always feel Rachel’s absence. Which is why I try to be a good girl, a good daughter for the Quinns; a better girl than my brothers are boys, a better daughter than they are sons. Nate and Billy are Quinns by birth. They can never be rejected. But my place is tenuous. So I’ll do whatever I can to make sure Eleanor and Lawrence love me, if not the most, then at least as much. I do anything they ask, anything my brothers ask. Just, please, please, please I beg you: don’t leave me behind.

That sounds so mawkish, doesn’t it? Pathetic, too. Like I’m someone who wallows in self-pity.

I lean forward. Let me stipulate, for the record, that I don’t feel sorry for myself. My family has been nothing but good—to me and for me. They would never leave me.

“They would never leave me,” I repeat, but this time I stammer. “They’d never . . . no one is leaving anyone . . . we love each other . . .”

Christ, it’s hot in my apartment. I feel like I’m suffocating. My skin sticks to my chair and makes a sucking sound when I move. I need liquids, moisturizer, a towel, something.