Excerpt:

None of it would have happened if she hadn’t seen him crying.

That’s what it comes down to, Fiona realizes, all these years later: one moment in a dim and dusty corner of the Santa Placida Public Library, a place she’d never been before and probably wouldn’t see again. Ten minutes before closing. A pile of books with room for just one more. A right turn instead of a left at the end of a stack. And a boy on the floor with his knees drawn up and his head in his hands, striving for silence and almost – almost – succeeding.

It’s strange to think of it like that, and frightening to consider the confluence of events that brought her to that place at that moment. It could have been different, so different, so easily. If her brother hadn’t been hospitalized; if it had been during the school year and not the summer; if she’d been a few years older, or a few years younger; if her father’s sister hadn’t lived a couple of hours away by car. If Aunt Joan had been a different person, caring and kind instead of cold and removed, someone Fiona wanted to see rather than someone she needed to escape, if only into a book – if if if if IF. Our lives are built on a tower of ifs, she thinks, wispy, translucent, brittle ifs. She shivers, because it’s all so precarious, isn’t it? Too precarious. Nudge just one thing and nothing makes sense anymore; remove one if and the whole structure crumbles. What kind of way is that to live? How can anyone bear it?

Her heart is pounding again, fast, too fast. She closes her eyes, takes a few slow, deliberate breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In and out. In and out. She’ll have to go back to bed soon, or Stefan will come looking for her. He has been more attentive than usual since they returned from the funeral, and she knows he knows something but not how much. Sometimes she catches him watching her, brow furrowed, considering, and when she does, she flashes him a smile, or grabs his hand and squeezes it. He always smiles or squeezes back, and she thinks that maybe it will be all right, maybe he doesn’t know and won’t have to know, maybe they can just move on from here and the last few weeks can be like a small, silent glitch on an old cassette tape that no one listens to anymore anyway.

That is what she hopes; that is what she wants.

That is all she wants.

This is what she tells herself.