Again, Lyn shook her head.

“I couldn’t ever get pregnant again,” she said. “We tried for seventeen years. Jiminy was Henry’s.”

Jiminy took a moment to absorb this.

“So what did my grandpa do?” she asked. “Nothing?”

Lyn sighed.

“We only spoke of it once, which was plenty. He blamed me for marrying Edward after what we’d done. Told me I was fickle and immoral, and that Edward deserved better.”

“But you really did love Edward,” Jiminy said.

“More than anything in this world,” Lyn replied. “I woulda done anything to erase what happened with Henry. Anything. I kept it secret, and I don’t think Edward ever suspected. Folks said his real father was a white man who’d raped his mother, so he always believed this accounted for Jiminy’s lighter skin. And make no mistake, Edward was Jiminy’s father in every other way that mattered.”

“How did my grandpa treat Jiminy?”

“He loved her. Doted on her, to tell the truth, which made Edward so proud. It was me Henry hated.”

“He really never forgave you?”

“Not till it was too late,” Lyn replied. “He never wanted me around. Made me get another job at the Brayers even, which . . .”

As Lyn trailed off, Jiminy looked over at her quickly.

She pressed: “Which what?”

Lyn crossed her arms to hug herself.

“Which is when everything went wrong.”

Lyn shook her head slowly, and Jiminy wondered how she could possibly carry so much pain around with her every day.

“What do you mean?” she asked softly. “What went wrong?”

Lyn stared at the river far below them.

“Travis Brayer took an interest in me, and Travis Brayer don’t like bein’ told no.”

Jiminy felt suddenly and deeply chilled. She shivered violently.

“Henry felt awful about it,” Lyn continued in a detached monotone. “After Edward and Jiminy were killed, he just fell apart. He didn’t know how to make sense of any of it; he didn’t know how to grieve. He just got worse and worse. He asked me to take that photograph of him in December of ’66, right before Christmas. We came here to take it.”

Jiminy looked at the photo again. It was true; it had been taken right where she was now standing. She could see the magnolia branch above her grandfather’s head and the edge of Edward’s gravestone beside him.

“He told me it was important that I take the photo, that we needed a record,” Lyn continued. “He was a little out of his mind then, searching for something he couldn’t find. And then he just broke.”

Jiminy stayed very still, trying to imagine what her grandfather must have been feeling, standing here, over four decades earlier.

“He’d lost a close friend, and his daughter,” Jiminy said, almost to herself. “My mother’s half sister—my aunt . . .”

The full weight of this impacted her. She and Jiminy Waters shared more than just a name. They shared blood.

Jiminy looked at Lyn.

“Which makes you my . . .”

She stopped. This was getting too confusing. No, Lyn wasn’t actually related to her, she quickly worked out. And thankfully, neither was Bo. But they were all tangled up in the same web.

“So now you know,” Lyn said. “I’d just as soon the Henry part stay between us. For Edward’s sake.”

Jiminy nodded slowly.

“I won’t tell, but with the DNA testing, it’s hard to say what might come out,” Jiminy replied.

Lyn nodded, resigned to being disappointed. Jiminy ached for her. She ached for all of them. Things got so complicated when blood was involved.

Chapter 16

Of all the many things Willa could be worrying about, she found herself preoccupied with the whereabouts of Jiminy’s kitten. Cholera had slipped out the window per her normal routine, to hunt or wander, but failed to return, and had now been missing for several days. Perhaps a coyote had carried her off in the night. Perhaps she’d left of her own free will. When someone or something disappeared, did the reasons really matter all that much in the end? People yearned to sweeten absence with explanations, Willa knew. But did they provide any real, lasting solace? In her opinion, the jury was out.

Still, Willa missed Cholera. She’d never before allowed live animals in her house, because she’d been raised to keep them outside, to maintain some separation between human and beast. In a family as poor as hers had been, the distinction had been important. But she’d made an exception for Cholera, because she’d come to welcome her visits. The first one had happened the day after Willa returned from the hospital to recuperate at home. The kitten slunk into the bedroom and leapt up onto the mattress, where she stretched and used her little claws to knead the blanket like it was dough for biscuits. Willa could feel the tiny pricks on her skin below, but she hadn’t cried out or shifted. She’d just watched the kitten settle into the little space she’d kneaded for herself, and reflected that that’s what you did with a bed that you made. You lay in it.

Willa heard the front door close and wondered whether it was Lyn, Jiminy, or Jean. Jean had moved into the farmhouse to help tend to Willa’s recovery, though she spent an equal amount of time playing virtual tennis in the room down the hall.

“Yoo-hoo,” Willa called.

“It’s me, Grandma,” Jiminy answered, entering Willa’s bedroom from the hall. “We need to talk.”

Half an hour later, Willa longed to rest her brain and eyes, but her granddaughter was still asking questions. Intensive conversation was new terrain for them, and even had Willa been in perfect health, she wasn’t sure she’d have been up for it.

Jiminy hadn’t shared anything that Lyn had told her. Her aim was to gather information rather than dispense it, and to that end, she’d been peppering her grandmother with queries about the past, claiming curiosity about her mother’s childhood. Jiminy had calculated that Willa would be more forthcoming if she believed Jiminy was simply trying to understand just what exactly had gone wrong with her mother.

So far, the strategy was proving fruitful. In response to Jiminy’s probing, Willa had tried her best to explain how much Margaret had worshiped the first Jiminy, and how fiercely she’d mourned her and Edward’s deaths. Willa had admitted she’d lied about the circumstances of their deaths at the time, ascribing them to a tragic car accident in an attempt to shield her young daughter a bit longer from the devastating actuality of the world.

Willa remembered clearly how Margaret had cocked her little head and pronounced her a liar. Apparently she had been eavesdropping outside Willa and Henry’s door right after the bodies were found, and had heard her father sob and rage and ask desperately how anyone could do such things to another human being. She’d heard him declare he didn’t want to be on a planet that condoned this, in a life where this went on. Margaret had been haunted by his words, both at the time and years afterward, whenever she’d thought about her father’s premature death. She felt she’d witnessed the exact moment he’d decided to leave.

Jiminy listened carefully as her grandmother relayed all of this in her thin, tired voice.

“So maybe that’s why Mom decided she’d prefer an alternate world, too,” Jiminy said. “And after her car accident, after the pills took over, she finally fully went for it. She cracked and went for it.”

And had proceeded to live an irresponsible life on her own selfish terms. But who were they to question this, in the end? Maybe it was the only way to be.

“She’s not completely unaware, you know,” Willa said. “She called the other day. And she sent this.”

Willa indicated a package resting on her bedside table that Jiminy hadn’t even noticed. It was addressed to her, mailed from a Greek seaport.