For three years she had thought she had one living son and one buried one, and she had made a kind of peace with that arrangement, the terrible ordinary peace that grieving parents make.

And now, in the space of a few sentences, the arithmetic of her family had been reversed: the son she thought she had was gone, and the son she thought she had buried had been alive and lying to her the whole time.

She had to lose Sebastian all over again, freshly, in that living room, and simultaneously lose Santiago in a different and worse way, to the truth of what he was.

Two sons, taken from her twice, in a single afternoon, by the same terrible fact.