shouldn’t have been surprised that Lillian Taft’s attic was insulated, air-conditioned, and neat as a pin. It ran the entire length of the house, a third floor that was only accessible through a staircase tucked away behind a door that I’d assumed led to yet another linen closet.

This definitely wasn’t a closet.

“Mim isn’t what one would call organized,” Lily said, staring over the sea of boxes laid out in a labyrinth that criss-crossed the room. “Luckily, however, my mother is, and she got it in her head to organize Mim’s attic a few summers back. I don’t know where your mama’s things are, but it’s a good bet that they’re all together.”

It took a half hour for me to find a framed portrait, quite possibly the one that had once hung downstairs: Eleanor Elisabeth Taft, in all her debutante finery. I’d never thought that my mom and I looked alike, but at seventeen, she’d been freckled and slight, with hair several shades darker than mine and eyes at least two sizes too big for her face. There was something about the set of her lips and the tilt of her chin that was utterly familiar.

As Aunt Olivia had once pointed out, we had the same cheekbones.

The portrait hit me harder than I expected. The white gloves. The up-do. The bouquet of white roses in her lap. This girl? She didn’t look anything like my mother. She looked…

“Hollow,” I said out loud.

Lily popped up from behind a trio of wardrobe boxes several feet away. “Did you find something?”

I held up the portrait. “One daughter, banished to the attic in disgrace.”

Lily stared at the portrait for almost as long as I had. I wondered if she was thinking about Secrets and how close she’d come to disgrace of her own.

“Well, don’t just stand there like a bump on a log,” she ordered, recovering. “Get started on those boxes.”

There were easily two dozen boxes behind the portrait, stacked in columns of three, all the way back to the wall. Each one had been marked in the upper right corner in thick black marker: E.T.

Eleanor Taft.

The contents of the boxes were meticulously organized: elementary school projects and dolls that my mother had outgrown, photograph albums of two little girls at a lake, year after year. I found an entire series of boxes dedicated to my mother’s old dance costumes.

I hadn’t even known she’d taken ballet.

Near the back, I finally hit pay dirt: three boxes marked E.T.—S.B.

As in: Symphony Ball.

I wondered briefly at the fact that Aunt Olivia had only one box at her house dedicated to Debutante keepsakes, but that my grandmother had somehow kept every party favor, every invitation, every notecard of my mother’s. There was a decorative pillow hand-stitched with the words Symphony Deb; a program from my mother’s Pearls of Wisdom listing the items in the silent auction. There were a pair of white slippers and a pair of white heels and a small ring box—empty. What looked to be a vintage purse contained only two items: the stub of a movie ticket and a small, braided bit of ribbon.

I held the ribbon in my hand for a moment. Three strands of white, woven together. After a moment, I returned the contents to the purse and set it aside.

The last item in the last box sucked me in like a black hole. The memory book had obviously been put together by the Symphony Ball Committee to mark the season. The cover was made of a matte black fabric, crinkled and ridged in a way that made me think of a formal dress. There was a small square cut out of the middle of the cover, and inside, there was a picture of a single red rose.

Lily slid in beside me. The two of us sat cross-legged with our knees touching as I paged through the book, sheet by sheet. I’d never been the slumber-party, confiding-in-other-girls type. Having Lily here with me should have felt invasive, but it didn’t.

Unlike Aunt Olivia’s album, the one between us on the floor didn’t include loose pictures. Instead, the photographs had been scanned and printed, like a yearbook—if that yearbook was printed on paper thick enough that each page could have practically stood on its own.

The book was divided up by events. Pearls of Wisdom. The pool party. The scavenger hunt. The Halloween masquerade… Lily was right. Everything we’d done, my mother had done, too. I wasn’t even halfway through the book when I started turning back, scanning each individual picture in detail, looking for my mom.

There she was at the masquerade, dressed, the caption informed me, as Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. Her mask was a deep rose pink, accented in golden thread and beads. She wasn’t alone in the picture—there was a boy beside her. It took me a moment to recognize him, beneath the mask.

Lucas Ames.

I paged back further, to the scavenger hunt, and was rewarded with a whole page of pictures of each team. My mom’s had consisted of two boys and three girls. I recognized Lucas again, but barely registered his presence or that of the other boy, because almost all of the photographs were of the three girls.

Three girls, with their arms thrown around each other.

Three girls, posing ridiculously for the camera.

Three girls, pressing exaggerated kisses to each other’s cheeks.

They’d done their hair in matching styles: French braids, tied to one side. Woven through each of their braids, there was a white ribbon. It stood out, stark against my mother’s dark hair. One of the other girls was blond, and the third—the third, I recognized.

Her hair was red.

“That’s Sadie-Grace’s stepmother,” Lily realized. “It looks like she and your mother were—”

“Not just passing acquaintances?” I suggested. I checked the box for video footage of the hunt and came up empty, so I flipped back further in the book and found more shots of the three girls, almost always together, always a unit, always wearing a white ribbon somewhere on their bodies. There they were at the pool party, legs dangling into the water. At Pearls of Wisdom, they stood side by side behind the stage, proudly displaying their pearls and waiting to go forth.

I flipped forward, past the masquerade. I only found one more picture of the three girls, taken at Christmastime, in front of a two-story-tall tree. They were wearing white scarves and white hats.

They weren’t laughing.

I looked down at the caption—Ellie, Greer, Ana. I flipped past Christmas, to New Year’s, Casino Night, a spa day, something called a “glove luncheon,” the Symphony Ball itself.

There were no more pictures of my mother.

No more pictures of Ana.

Greer was suddenly surrounded by other girls. Other boys. I paused near the end of the memory book on a photograph of Greer being escorted down an elevated platform. Her father—or a man I assumed was her father—was waiting for her at the end, his arm outheld. Greer had a bouquet of white roses in one arm and the other was tucked through the arm of her escort.

Greer Richards, daughter of Edmond and Sarah Richards, I read the caption, escorted by Lucas Ames.

“Sawyer.” Lily’s voice snapped me back to the present. I looked up from the photographs.

“What?” I said. It didn’t take a genius to figure out why my mother had disappeared from the pictures. At some point between Christmas and New Year’s, she’d told her family that she was pregnant.

She’d been on the street by New Year’s Day.

“Sawyer,” Lily said again. “Your phone.”

It was ringing. I pushed aside the question on the surface of my mind—What happened to the other girl? To Ana?—and looked down at the screen. Suddenly my mom’s Debutante year didn’t seem quite so pressing.

The name on caller ID, programmed in during the month I’d spent at her beck and call, was Campbell.