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around here, and I thought it might be fun.”
    Dad looked equally unsure. “What about work?”
    Emma’s job as a camp counselor had fallen through when not enough kids showed up on the first day, so he’d hired her as a research assistant to pass the time over the summer. This basically meant running back and forth between home and the library to fetch and return books. She was pretty sure he could survive without her.
    “You’ll be busy finishing up your revisions anyhow,” Mom reminded him. “And I’ve got my article to write. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. The house will be quieter this way.”
    Emma thought to point out that as noisy teenagers go, she fell pretty low on the scale, but decided against it. New York was only the first step in her plan, and if she were to mess things up now, before even really having a chance to begin, she’d be stuck at home for the rest of the summer with nothing to do but wonder about things from afar.
    Ever since she found the birth certificate, she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that she should go down to North Carolina. Her grandfather was buried in a cemetery not far from Nate’s house—in the same town where she’d been born—and though she’d never been there before, there was no reason not to think that Thomas Quinn Healy was buried there too.
    She wasn’t sure what she hoped to find. It was just a feeling she had, that she should make the trip. She had two parents and three siblings, none of whom understood her at all. Emma felt she owed it to the one brother who might have known her better to pay him a visit. It was as simple as that.
    The night before, she’d trailed around the backyard after Mom, helping to clean up after the party and trying to figure out how to ask the question on her mind without really asking anything at all. Mom had always had a tendency to be vague and tight-lipped about the past; she’d never been the type to carry baby pictures in her wallet or tell childhood anecdotes at the dinner table. Emma had always assumed this was because she—like the rest of them—was too focused on her work to see anything outside of it. But now she realized that in the hiding of whatever had happened back then—the disappearance of her twin brother from the family story—other things must have gotten lost as well.
    “Do you ever miss North Carolina?” she’d begun, finally, and Mom had stiffened. She was holding a soda can between two fingers, and it took her a moment to let go, dropping it into a garbage bag with a loud clink.
    “I guess so,” she said. “But no more than any of the other places we’ve lived. Plus, your brother’s still down there, so we get to visit—”
    “My brother?”
    “Nate,” Mom said, giving her a funny look. “What’s up with you?”
    Emma shrugged, torn between the desire to ask more and the fear that it might ruin her plans. She’d already made up her mind about driving to North Carolina, and while there was no doubt that it was completely irrational—it was foolish and illogical and probably more than a little bit stupid—she was just restless enough not to care. She wanted to go somewhere unknown and unfamiliar, somewhere farther than the college, beyond the hill and outside of this town. Quite simply, she wanted to go .
    The plan was simple. She’d borrow Patrick’s car in New York (this sounded far more harmless than stealing it) and then stop in DC, where she could stay with Annie, finally working her way down to North Carolina, where Nate and his fiancée lived in the same house her parents once had. If everything worked out, she could be there in a week, just in time for her seventeenth birthday. And after so many years of unsatisfying birthdays—of wishing for goody bags and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and yellow cake with chocolate frosting, but instead getting encyclopedias and magnifying glasses and leather-bound poetry collections—where better to spend it than with the one person