I turned her gently, lifted her chin so that our eyes could meet. “Okay, whatever you want to do, do,” I said. “I love you, you know.”

“I love you, too,” she said. “I-I know I’m not easy to live with about this stuff. I know it’s hard on Grace. I know my anxieties, that they kind of rub off on her. But lately, with that show, it’s made it all very real for me again.”

“I know,” I said. “I just want you to be able to live for the present, too. Not always fixate on the past.”

I felt her shoulders move. “Fixate?” she said. “Is that what you think I do?”

It was the wrong word. You’d think an English teacher could come up with something better.

“Don’t patronize me,” Cynthia said. “You think you know, but you don’t. You can’t ever know.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, because it was true. I leaned in and kissed her hair and went to work.

She wanted to be comforting in what she had to say, but it was just as important to be firm.

“I can understand you might find the idea a bit unsettling, really, I do. I can see where you might be feeling a bit squeamish about the whole thing, but I’ve been here before, and I’m telling you, I’ve given this a lot of thought, and this is the only way. That’s the way it is with family. You have to do what you have to do, even if it’s difficult, even if it’s painful. Of course what we have to do to them is going to be difficult, but you have to look at the bigger picture. But it’s a bit like when they said-you’re probably not old enough to remember this-that you have to destroy a village to save it. It’s something like that. Think of our family as a village. We have to do whatever it takes to save it.”

She liked the “we” part. That they were a kind of team.

When she was first pointed out to me at the University of Connecticut, my friend Roger whispered, “Archer, check it out. That is one seriously fucked-up chick. She’s hot-she’s got hair like a fire engine-but she’s majorly screwed up.”

Cynthia Bigge was sitting down in the second row of the lecture hall, taking notes on literature of the Holocaust, and Roger and I were up near the back, close to the door, so we could make a break for it as soon as the professor was done droning on.

“What do you mean, fucked up?” I whispered back.

“Okay, you remember that thing, a few years ago, there was this girl, her whole family disappeared, nobody ever saw them again?”

“No.” I didn’t read the papers or watch the news at that time in my life. Like many teens, I was somewhat self-absorbed-I was going to be the next Philip Roth or Robertson Davies or John Irving; I was in the process of narrowing it down-and oblivious to current events, except for when one of the more radical organizations on campus wanted students to protest something or other. I tried to do my part because it was a great place to meet girls.

“Okay, so her parents, her sister, or maybe it was a brother, I can’t remember, they all disappeared.”

I leaned in closer, whispered, “So what, they got killed?”

Roger shrugged. “Who the fuck knows? That’s what makes it so interesting.” He tipped his head in Cynthia’s direction. “Maybe she knows. Maybe she offed the bunch of them. Haven’t you ever wanted to kill off your entire family?”

I shrugged. I guessed it crossed everyone’s mind at some point.

“What I think is that she’s just stuck up,” Roger said. “She won’t give you the time of day. Sticks to herself, you see her in the library all the time, just working, doing stuff. Doesn’t hang out with anybody, doesn’t go out to things. Nice rack, though.”

She was pretty.

It was the only course I shared with her. I was in the School of Education, preparing to become a teacher, in case the whole bestselling-writer thing didn’t happen immediately. My parents, retired now and living in Boca Raton, had both been teachers, and had liked it okay. At least it was recession-proof. I asked around, learned Cynthia was enrolled in the School of Family Studies at the Storrs campus. It included courses in gender studies, marital issues, care of the elderly, family economics, all kinds of shit like that.

I was sitting out front of the university bookstore, wearing a UConn Huskies sweatshirt and glancing at some lecture notes, when I sensed someone standing in front of me.

“Why’re you asking around about me?” Cynthia said. It was the first I’d heard her speak. A soft voice, but confident.

“Huh?” I said.

“Somebody said you were asking about me,” she repeated. “You’re Terrence Archer, right?”

I nodded. “Terry,” I said.

“Okay, so, why are you asking about me?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“What do you want to know? Is there something you want to know? If there is, just come out and ask me, because I don’t like people talking about me behind my back. I can tell when it’s going on.”

“Listen, I’m sorry, I only-”

“You think I don’t know people talk about me?”

“God, what are you, paranoid? I wasn’t talking about you. I just wondered whether-”

“You wondered whether I’m the one. Whose family disappeared. Okay, I am. Now you can mind your own fucking business.”

“My mom’s hair is red,” I said, cutting her off. “Not as red as yours. Sort of a blondy red, you know? But yours is really beautiful.” Cynthia blinked. “So yeah, maybe I asked a couple of people about you, because I wondered if you were seeing anybody, and they said no, and now I guess I can see why.”

She looked at me.

“So,” I said, making a big thing of stuffing my notes into my backpack and flinging it over my shoulder, “sorry and all.” I stood up and turned to go.

“I’m not,” Cynthia said.

I stopped. “You’re not what?”

“I’m not seeing anybody.” She swallowed.

Now I was feeling my neck. “I didn’t mean to be an asshole there,” I said. “You just seemed a bit, you know, touchy.”

We agreed that she’d been touchy, and that I had been an asshole, and somehow ended up having a coffee at a campus snack bar, and Cynthia told me that she lived with her aunt when she wasn’t attending the university.

“Tess is pretty decent,” Cynthia said. “She didn’t have a husband anymore, didn’t have any kids of her own, so my moving in, after the thing with my family, that kind of turned her world upside down, you know? But she was okay with it. I mean, what the hell was she going to do? And she was sort of going through a tragedy, too, her sister and brother-in-law and nephew just disappearing like that.”

“So what happened to your house? Where you lived with your parents and brother?”

That was me. Mr. Practical. Girl’s family vanishes and I come up with a real estate question.

“I couldn’t live there alone,” Cynthia said. “And like, there was no one to pay the mortgage or anything anyway, so when they couldn’t find my family the bank sort of took it back and these lawyers got involved, and whatever money my parents had put into the house went into this trust thing, but they’d hardly made a dent in the mortgage, you know? And now, it’s been so long, they figure everyone is dead, right? Legally, even if they aren’t.” She rolled her eyes and grimaced.

What could I say?

“So Aunt Tess, she’s putting me through school. Like, I’ve had summer jobs and stuff, but that doesn’t cover much. I don’t know how she’s managed it, really, raising me, paying for my education. She must be in debt up to her eyeballs, but she never complains about it.”

“Boy,” I said. I took a sip of coffee.

And Cynthia, for the first time, smiled. “‘Boy,’” she said. “That’s all you have to say, Terry? ‘Boy’?” As quickly as it had appeared, the smile vanished. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I expect people to say. I don’t know what the fuck I’d say if I was sitting across from me.”