It is also, I was learning, one of the things that had kept me from living.

“Is it true?” I asked.

My voice came out rougher than I intended.

Juliet lifted her head and looked at me, and my mother was right.

She had our father’s eyes.

I had spent my whole life looking at those eyes in the mirror and in old photographs, the particular gray of them, the particular set, and now they were looking back at me out of the face of a young woman in a housekeeper’s uniform, and I did not understand how I had failed to see it for six months.

“It’s true,” she said.