I sneak into Setsuko’s bedroom that night and watch her sleep. I speculate about whether or not dreaming different dreams would be enough to change a child’s personality. In this state, she looks most like my baby, but I know it is a lie. I have failed. The child before me is not Setsuko. Rather, she is a perversion of my daughter, neither alive nor dead.

Close to midnight, I get a call from Wyatt. He wants a divorce. I beg him to reconsider. What happened on set was traumatic, I say, but we can figure everything out. I can go to therapy again. Wyatt and I can go to couples’ therapy. We can put Setsuko in therapy. We can all go into therapy.

“I’m sorry, Karen,” he replies, “but it’s too late for therapy. We should have ended this years ago.” Coco’s meltdown during the film, the cat. It’s been too much.

“If she can show me that her memories have taken hold,” I say, “we can have our family back good as new.”

“Maybe you were scrutinizing Setsuko so closely for a sign that you missed it.”

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Wyatt is in love. The wife-actress is pregnant. She said she couldn’t work with him, that it was too painful, unless something changed. He was agonized over what to do, but now he’s certain. And if I was honest with myself, did I really want our family back? Though he will, of course, share custody of Setsuko, moving on will be better for all of us.

Wyatt’s things disappear from the house. School starts. The master bedroom becomes littered with the pictures and papers from my first Setsuko. I keep her journal next to my pillow. I should be more attentive to second Setsuko, but I don’t have the heart. Coco is out of control. Her teachers complain that she bullies the other children. I visit the principal’s office. The principal shows me drawings my daughter has done in art class. Each depicts a Japanese girl getting killed in a most macabre fashion: blown apart, poisoned, drowned, set on fire, disemboweled, hung from the rafters of a barn while the farm animals look on in fear. Across the bottom of one of the pages is scrawled the words, “I want to die, die, die, die, die!”

I pick Setsuko up after my meeting with the principal, but I don’t want to head home. I know we should talk about the drawings. Instead, I ask her what she’d like to do. I’ll take her anywhere she wants. We drive to the Santa Monica Pier. The chintzy restaurants and malodorous hot dog stands and mobile vendors selling ice cream are clotted with families. Surfers and waves practice their ability to crash. Garbage roiling in the water tosses against the sand. Teens blast pop songs from portable stereos and rub each other with suntan lotion. It occurs to me they are the age Setsuko should be, while she is stuck at nine. I think of Wyatt’s growing child, becoming more of a distinct person by the day. Will he love it more than he loves our little girl? I let Coco go wild. Whenever she asks for something to eat, I hand over the money. She plays arcade games and boards every mini-ride, some of them several times, before she tires.