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Hobby Alistair—every girl, every mother, every father. Eventually Demeter had grown out of it and moved on to being in love with Patrick Loom, then Anders Peashway, then Jake Randolph, but Jake only because Penny loved him, and Demeter wanted to be like Penny.
    Demeter let her face fall in fake disappointment-in-herself. “After that, I can’t remember.”
    “You don’t remember getting into the car?” the Chief asked.
    Demeter gnawed on her lower lip. She had tried out for
Grease
this past winter—she’d desperately wanted to play Rizzo—but she’d gotten only a part in the chorus, so she’d quit, much to her parents’ dismay. What Mr. Nelson and Mrs. Yurick hadn’t realized during the auditions was that Demeter was an excellent actress.
    “I remember getting in the car,” she said. “I sat in the backseat, on the right. Hobby was in the backseat on the left. Jake was in the front passenger seat, and Penny was driving.”
    “Penny was driving even though it was Jake’s car?”
    “She was the only one who hadn’t been drinking,” Demeter said.
    Even so, Jake had tried to take the keys. He’d held Penny’s wrist and tried to pry open her fingers, but she had swung her arms at his face as if to hit him, and he’d backed off. Penny had been in full freak-out mode. That was exactly what Demeter had thought at the time: She’s freaking out. Freaking freaking.
    Hobby had said, with his unflappable calm, “Jeez, Pen, pull yourself together.”
    “Please,” Jake had said. “Please let me drive.”
    Penny had screamed. No words, just a scream.
    Demeter had felt her stomach do funny things. She was certain Penny was going to spill the beans, even though Demeter had made her promise. Had made her swear.
    “And Penny drove out to Cisco Beach,” Demeter said. “And she was going really fast.” Even while they were still on the road, the car was shuddering. Jake was pleading with Penny to slow down, while Hobby was leaning forward, trying to see the speedometer. He seemed most interested in finding out how fast the Jeep could go. Demeter was in a drunken daze, a dreamlike state in which she wasn’t sure if what seemed to be happening was really happening. She was, however, wearing her seat belt. And Jake was wearing his. That, she thought, was the result of good parenting. The twins were unbuckled because that was the kind of house they’d been raised in—an unbuckled household. Zoe laid down no rules. “Listen,” Zoe had said recently to Lynne Castle. “Raising them without hard- and-fast rules has worked. Look how wonderfully they’re turning out.”
    D.O.A.
    Coma.
    “And then we crashed,” Demeter said.

ZOE
    S he had seen Jordan at the hospital. He was in the waiting room with the Castles. Ava wasn’t there. The fact that Ava wasn’t there was a relief, but not for the usual reason. If Ava wasn’t there, Zoe thought, then things mustn’t be that bad.
    The police had called Zoe and told her that there had been an accident and that she should come to the hospital right away. When she arrived and saw the expression on Lynne Castle’s face, she knew. It was death or near-death, but she didn’t know which child. She had read
Sophie’s Choice
along with everybody else, and along with everybody else she had thought, No, I wouldn’t be able to pick. If they made me choose, I’d tell them to put a bullet in my head. I’d rather die than choose one over the other. Dr. Field came out. Zoe had known Dr. Field for fifteen years. He had sewed up her forefinger after a particularly bad accident with her Santoku knife. He had treated her kids for strep throat and pinkeye and something like fifty-two earaches between them. He had been the one to pop Hobby’s dislocated shoulder back into place, right there on the thirty-five-yard line of the Whalers’ field. He had been the one to show up at the Randolphs’ house when Ernie Randolph died of SIDS. He was the island’s doctor, on-call something like