His intensity almost alarmed me. “No—they stayed, her parents. She was placed with a Jewish family in New York until she was eighteen.”
He stared at me.
“What?”
There was a strange sort of silence when people hadn’t quite finished saying what they wanted to, a silence where you had to gauge whether to urge or lie in wait. I lay down my fork and watched at Noah. Waiting.
“My family’s from New York.” His eyes stayed steady on mine. “They took in a German girl. During the war.”
Pure satisfaction rocked through me, akin to the pleasure of trying one puzzle piece after another and finally having the right one snap in.They took in a German girl during the war.Of course they did. Of course O’ma had come to Nantucket because the family she’d lived with vacationed here, and she’d fallen in love with the son of the house. Why else would her picture be in a photo album? “That’s it, then.”
He shook his head. “It’s too coincidental.”
“It’s not. It’s why I’m here. She grew up with your family. It’s why her photo was in one of your family’s scrapbooks.”
“What?Why didn’t you mention that?”
“I forgot!”
He pinched his nose. “If she moved in with them when she was a little kid, they would have been like siblings.”
“I hate to disappoint you, but they weren’t.”
He leaned forward, as though the sheer force of his personality could make me renege. “They grew up together. Siblings write letters.”
“Not like these letters. Not outside of Westeros.”
“Are you sure?”
“So very, very sure.”
“You might have misread them.”
“Dude. I didn’t. Want to read them yourself?”
“Yes. No. Maybe.”
He could sort out his feelings on his own time. “Let’s ask your grandfather, then.”
“Right. We could. But—” He shoved his fingers through his curls. “We can’t.”
“Really?”
He rubbed his forehead. “Look. My family worked hard to get where they are—”
“If this is a lecture about the American dream or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—”
“It’s about anti-Semitism.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. People were happy to hire Barbanels, but they didn’t want to socialize with us. We weren’t Christian enough, we weren’t white enough, we weren’tenough. My family went through a lot to fit in on this island. If my grandpa had an affair when he was engaged to my grandmother? People don’t need to know.” He dropped hishead in his hands. “And for it to be some weird pseudo-incestuous relationship...”
“Hey.” I was bizarrely affronted on my O’ma’s behalf. “Itwasn’tincestuous. And maybe they never felt like siblings! I mean, obviously they didn’t if they fell in love, and maybe no one else thought of them sibling-like, either. And—I get struggling in the forties and fifties to be accepted, but I don’t think anyone’s going to care today.”
“Yeah, well, you can leave the island afterwards, so it doesn’t matter to you, does it? People like scandals here.”
“But it’s not even a very good scandal!”
