I have thought since about that last line, and how wrong it turned out to be, because talk had, in a sense, buried her son Sebastian under his brother’s name, and none of us yet knew it.

Teresa had lost, or believed she had lost, one of her two boys, and I have thought since about the particular texture of a mother’s grief for one twin while the other lives.

She had told me once, years before, that raising identical twins had taught her they were never really the same, that from the cradle she could tell them apart by things no one else could name, a difference in the weight of a cry, a certain look.

She had prided herself on that, on being the one person in the world who could never be fooled by their sameness.