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it made her feel just a little bit less alone.
    He shook his head and then stood abruptly. “Nothing,” he said, adopting his usual goofy grin, allowing the moment to be snuffed out as quickly as it had begun.
    Overhead the sky had turned flat and gray, and the trees above them shuddered beneath the first curtain of rain. Emma held out her palm to catch the drops clinging to the fire escape above.
    “We’ve already had forty inches of rain this year,” Patrick said, hopping down a few steps, as if determined to return to his usual self. “That puts us ahead of the average by over ten inches. Do you realize that the volume of rain in Manhattan just for the month of June would be enough to fill—”
    “Patrick,” Emma said quietly, cutting him off.
    “Sorry,” he said, tipping his head back to squint at the sky. There was something about the way he was standing—the sun failing above him and the rain coming down fast now, the smell of the puddles and the cars splashing past—that slipped the heavy bolt of her memory, and Emma looked up at him through narrowed eyes.
    “Do you remember that day in the park?” she asked, still trolling her mind for the details. “It was pouring, and nobody would take me, so I cried until you finally agreed.”
    Patrick looked at her from beneath wet eyelashes. “And we were the only people in the whole damn park.”
    “And we played in the puddles by the duck pond.”
    “And I tried to teach you about the ducks.”
    “But I wouldn’t listen.”
    “Which just shows how far you’ve come,” he teased, reaching out a hand to pull her up from the step. Her clothes were damp now, but there was something leisurely about the shower. A few people scurried past to duck into coffee shops or pubs, but neither of them seemed in much of a hurry to find shelter.
    “See?” Patrick said, smiling at her as he started toward the corner. “I wasn’t the worst brother in the world.”
    Emma hesitated for a moment before following him, thinking of her other brother, the one she’d never had the chance to know. She hadn’t, until this moment, realized that she wouldn’t tell Patrick about what she’d discovered in the attic. There was still too much she didn’t understand, and it seemed as good a plan as any to act now and think later, to start moving in the right direction and save the questions for when she got there. She wasn’t sure exactly how it happened, but suddenly the quest to uncover a secret had begun to feel like something secretive too.
    Down the street a man with a trumpet began to play a bluesy song, and Emma closed her eyes to listen, the notes trembling out over the dampened block. When she opened them again, the sun was already beginning to split the clouds, and the world had gone from gray to silver.
    “Ready to go?” Patrick asked, and Emma thought of the car parked uptown, of all the miles ahead of her, the many states and roads and possibilities, and she nodded.
    She was ready.

chapter four
     
    Cutting through the broad state of Pennsylvania, Peter couldn’t help noticing the many green signs pointing off toward various colleges and universities. Some were bigger than others, some with fancy reputations, some he’d read about and some he hadn’t. Growing up just down the street from a college, it was sometimes easy to forget there were so many others out there. He rarely managed to get much farther than the hilltop campus, where each autumn students from across the country filtered into the stately buildings, books in hand and ready to learn.
    Peter had been waiting for years to join their ranks. Not there, of course, but somewhere like it, a place with an impressive name and a reputation to match. He felt he’d been ready to go off to school since at least the fifth grade, when he first saw an article about Harvard in the New York Times and swore to himself that he, too, would one day stroll across an unfamiliar campus, passing beneath ivy-covered arches