When the World Tips Over

A month earlier, Theo told Cassidy they had to evacuate their home due to a wildfire. Cassidy took her mother’s digital camera, her notebooks, and her mother’s postcards. Her father brings two cardboard boxes but won’t say what is in them. When Cassidy tries to look, he becomes angry. This lack of trust hurts her deeply.

Bernadette confesses. She was infatuated with Theo, obsessed with him, but guilty about what their relationship would mean to Clive. Clive awakens something in her, too.

Cassidy snoops into her father’s boxes and finds posters, pictures, reviews of The Blue Spoonful, and a newspaper clipping about the disappearance of Theo Fall, with a picture of his sons. She was initially upset to think Wynton might be her brother but now is convinced they’re not related. She wonders how her father could have left the family while their mother was pregnant. She reads a journal left by Maria Guerrero and learns the story of Alonso Fall and the Cain and Abel curse on the brothers. Cassidy thinks she knows why Theo left and says the fourth betrayal was Wynton’s.

Bernadette writes of The Day It Happened. She feared she was in love with Clive and Theo both, and she thinks, “there must’ve been two of me back then” (450).