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Liliane Marceau was four years old when she was told she was no longer Liliane Marceau.

Her name was Anne, said the new lady, the one with the glassy eyes who insisted Liliane call her “Maman.” Anne was close enough to her first name that the transition shouldn’t be any trouble, the lady told her.

Also, it was the name the lady and the policeman had picked out for their daughter, though the first three had died, along with a son.

Perhaps it was that knowledge that kept Liliane in line, even when she wanted to scream for her sister, or for her real mother and father.

How on earth had the first three Annes and the nameless boy died?

Was that what was in store for Liliane, too, if she didn’t cooperate?

The thought terrified her, and then there was the fact that her new mother repeated to her again and again, “Your old family is gone. We are your family now, Anne.”

It was confusing, though, because sometimes Maman told her that her old family was dead, like the three little Annes who’d come before her.

But then sometimes when she got angry, she would tell her that they had left her behind, that they didn’t want her anymore because she was a bad, thoughtless child.

Liliane wasn’t sure which felt worse: thinking that her first family had died, or thinking that they were all out there having a gay time without her.

The policeman, whom she was to call Papa, was much kinder.

He was the one who came to soothe her when she had nightmares, which was very often in that first year.

Sometimes when she was crying, he would cry, too, but only when Maman wasn’t around.

“I tried to save them,” he would say as he wept. “I tried, Anne, you must believe me.”

And perhaps it was the fact that he, too, called her Anne that sealed the deal. He was, after all, a policeman, and Mummy and Colette had told her she should trust the police. It was easier, he told her once, to just do what Maman said. “She always gets her way in the end anyhow,” he reported.

So she would be Anne, then, and over time, the memories of her family slipped away, bit by bit.

Maman began to tell her that they had never existed in the first place, that they had been imaginary friends from Anne’s early childhood, and when she looked to Papa for confirmation, he always nodded solemnly. Surely Papa would not lie to her.

Still, some of the memories stuck stubbornly around, like the memory of a long-ago sister bent over her desk, fervently writing poems, or the image of a mother who sang her songs and told her stories of Robin Hood and made sounds like the call of an eagle.

At night sometimes, in the silence of her home in the French countryside, and later, in the quiet of Boston’s South Shore, she could sometimes hear a distant kyi-kyi-kyi.

And how was she supposed to believe that those dreams were just dreams when she knew with all her heart that the correct answer was ko-ko-ko ?

That wasn’t the sort of thing a little girl made up on her own.

The winter after she turned eighteen, she was living with Maman and Papa in Weymouth, just south of Boston, when Madame and Monsieur Verdier came over for a small holiday party her parents were throwing.

The Verdiers were her parents’ closest friends, a couple whom they’d known vaguely in France because Mr. Verdier had been a policeman along with Papa.

The Verdiers had come to the United States first, and then they had agreed to sponsor her family’s immigration application.

She knew that Papa felt indebted to them for that kindness.

But at that holiday party, she was on her way to the restroom when she heard voices coming from her parents’ bedroom.

The door was partially ajar, and she charged in, ready to scold whoever had barged their way into a private area of the house.

She was surprised to find that it wasn’t an ill-behaved party guest after all; rather, it was Maman, who was fluttering her eyelashes at Monsieur Verdier as he fastened a bracelet on her wrist.

“Maman?” Anne asked, uneasily aware that she had walked in on some sort of intimate moment. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, dear,” Maman tittered, her face turning pink, “Hubert was just showing me a bracelet.” She held out her arm to show Anne, whose breath caught in her throat as she stared at the diamonds sparkling on Maman’s wrist.

Anne knew that bracelet. And she knew at once that her real mother, the one she’d been told was a figment of her imagination, had once possessed it. “That belonged to my mother,” she said, unable to look away as the diamonds sparkled in the dim light.

Maman tittered again, but she sounded uneasy and her eyes had turned cold.

“Why, yes, dear, this did belong to me. You see, your father and I gave it to Hubert as a payment for helping us to immigrate to the United States. Hubert knows that I miss it, and so he lets me try it on sometimes. That’s all. Don’t tell Papa.”

It was very clear that Maman was having an affair with Monsieur Verdier, which disgusted Anne.

But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was that seeing the bracelet again was bringing up a torrent of memories that had all but washed away.

“The bracelet belonged to my first mother,” she said slowly.

“She sewed it into the hem of my nightgown. I remember. She said it was to protect me.”

Maman’s face went from pink to beet red. Anne could see veins bulging out of her neck.

“Francine, what is she talking about?” asked Verdier, who had traces of Maman’s lipstick smeared across his chin.

“I haven’t any idea!” She glared at Anne. “The insolent child is making up stories!”

“It isn’t a story, Maman. I’m certain it’s true! I remember—” But she didn’t complete her sentence before Maman crossed to her in two long strides and slapped her across the face so hard that she could taste blood. She put a hand to her smarting cheek and looked at Maman in horror. “Maman!”

“Don’t you ever tell filthy lies like that again,” her mother said, her hand still raised as Anne shrank from her. “You ungrateful little brat. We gave you everything, and we can take it all away.”

Slowly, Anne backed out of the room, and then she ran to her own bedroom, where she slammed the door and, with her back pressed against it, slid down until she was sitting on the floor.

Maman was probably already whispering in Papa’s ear about what an ungracious good-for-nothing Anne was, and how she had caught her making up lies.

But it was all true. Anne knew it. Maman was having an affair, and the man she was having an affair with had possession of a bracelet that had once belonged to Anne’s real mother.

But what had happened to the woman? Anne couldn’t see her face in her mind’s eye anymore; it had been washed away by the years.

She had existed, though. She hadn’t been a figment of Anne’s imagination.

The bracelet was proof of that, wasn’t it?

One thing was clear: she could not remain in this house anymore.

She had graduated from high school in June, and she had spent the last six months living at home, taking a couple of classes at Suffolk while she tried to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

Maman’s plan, she knew, was to marry her off to someone wealthy, who could help better their family’s station in life.

She knew it galled Maman that after a decade in America, Papa still hadn’t made much of himself.

He wasn’t particularly successful, not like Monsieur Verdier.

His job as a contractor paid the bills, but it wasn’t prestigious.

The idea now was that Anne would marry well and enhance the family fortune.

But Anne wanted nothing to do with that.

She would figure out who she really was and what Maman was hiding, and one day, she would marry not for money but for love.

She grabbed her school backpack and stuffed as many clothes as she could fit inside, and then she emptied her piggy bank, which contained hundreds of dollars saved over the years.

Without a glance back, she left her room, and then walked, head held high, through the living room, where the holiday party was still going in full swing.

“Where are you going, Anne?” Papa called out, taking a step in her direction.

“Far away,” she called back. “Ask Maman why.”

And just as she had predicted, the mention of Maman stopped Papa in his tracks. He would let Anne go, assuming she’d be back, and he would rush to do damage control before Maman flew off the handle.

But Anne wasn’t coming back. And whatever Maman had done couldn’t be brushed under the carpet anymore.

Anne made it nineteen years before she ran out of options and had to come home.

She had done just what she set out to do: She had worked at a diner in Vermont to support herself while she took two college classes at a time.

She had completed her degree and gotten a job at a small bookstore, which she loved, because to give people books was to give them the world in their hands.

She fell in love with a good, kind man named Ronan O’Mara, a hardworking Irish immigrant who Maman would have hated because he wasn’t from a wealthy family, which Anne supposed was part of his charm.

He proposed on a spring Tuesday in Crystal Lake State Park; they were married in the very same spot that fall; and a month later, she discovered that she was pregnant.

Ronan was overjoyed, and after Lucas was born in spring of 1975, Anne was certain she had never been happier.

Their little boy was healthy, and they made a perfect family of three.