“Your affair,” I repeat stupidly.

Mom clears her throat. “When your pop and I met, I was still married to Aaron, and Pop had a serious girlfriend.”

I blink a few times. This means that Mom and Pop had an affair while they were both committed to other people.

“Oh,” I say numbly.

“We weren’t trying to deceive you, honey, or keep it a secret from you forever, but you were very young at the time.”

“Oh.” I glance at Afton. Her face is totally unsurprised by this revelation. She must have known somehow, too. Which is why she was saying those things, in her fight with Mom, about not being a good role model herself. “I see.”

“We always meant to explain how it happened to you, someday,” Pop says. “We should have. You’re old enough to handle it now.”

Or not.

I stand up. I’ve been so wrong about everything. In all of human history, it feels like there has never been anyone so spectacularly wrong as I have been.

“I have to go now,” I say, and then I run.

Chapter 43

43

When I finally stop running, I am, once again, at the rental shack for the paddleboards. It’s early enough that there’s very little line. I don’t even really think about it; I rent a board, collect it, and paddle myself into the exact center of the lagoon.

Where nobody will be able to find me.

Where I can be alone with my thoughts, with my wrongness, with the way I obliterated any semblance of dignity for me or my family, with all that I’ve been so clueless about, all that I didn’t know, because no one bothered to tell me.

I sit there on the board, legs in the cool green water, the sun beating down on my back, and I wish that the world would swallow me up. But the world cruelly refuses.

After a while I see something swimming toward me: a head, followed by a long, lean body in a red bikini. When she reaches me, she starts treading water. Which feels like a metaphor.

“I need to talk to you,” she says softly.

“You’ve been saying that all week.”

“Maybe now you’ll listen.”

“Fine. Come aboard, then.” I try to counterbalance so she won’t tip us over as she pulls herself up onto the board, water pouring off her. She arranges herself to face me, but then it seems like she loses her nerve.

The water laps at our legs. The wind stirs our hair. I can hear the agitated in and out of my sister’s breathing—I can almost see the words forming in her head, the excuses she wants to give me about what she’s done.

But I don’t want to hear it.

And she knows that. Because she knows me.