Rachel: The family made the decision not to tell Florence's sister, my grandmother's mother, that her sister had drowned. They all went in on this secret. When I was little, I heard the story. In my head, it was all summer and my great-great-grandmother was visiting every day in the hospital. My mother always told the story like, what kind of strength my great-great-grandmother must have had to keep this secret, to be able to walk into that hospital room every day and not breathe a word about the fact that her other daughter had just drowned. I was also super impressed with the story, but I was also always very interested in the fact that they had kept the secret. My mother positioned it, when we used to talk about, like, "Of course that's what you would do. Of course you would keep the secret." I remember even at a very young age, well, what if she had wanted to know? Even as I got older and we would rehash the story, and every now and then my grandmother would weigh in as well, and I still just kind of never wrapped my head around the idea that keeping the secret was the right thing to do. When I started thinking about what to write a novel about, it was a natural topic that I felt like we could come back to. There was unresolved business. Of course, over the years that story influenced so many other stories in my family. We became a secret-keeping family, I think in part because we elevated what my great-great-grandmother had done, this decision to withhold this information.