I jumped up to see what was behind us, but my father drove on. All I could see were darkness and a coat of ice halfway up the rear window of the car.

We turned onto another road.

"I've got to keep going, Vic. For Katie's sake."

My mother's head was in her hands.

"If we go back and he isn't injured, we'll walk into a trap. If he's badly hurt, there is not much we can do. The gas station farther up has an outside pay phone. It's closed now-no one will see us. I'll call in the accident."

My mother nodded silently. For a moment I thought she was crying. But she never cried-my father was the emotional one.

"What happened, Daddy? Did somebody get hurt?"

My mother raised her head and brushed back her long yellow hair. "Everything's all right," she said, her voice steady again. "There-there was a herd of deer by the side of the road, and your father was trying to avoid them. You know how they do, Katie, bolting across before you can see them. Some of them crashed into the wood. One went into the little dip next to the road."

"Did the deer get hurt?" I asked.

"I'm not sure," my father answered.

"Of course not," my mother said quickly, giving me the answer I wanted to hear but didn't believe. She unfastened her seat belt and knelt on the seat, facing me, to buckle me into my restraint.

My father drove more slowly now. There was a long silence.

"Victoria," he said at last, "I'm sorry."

She didn't reply.

Sorry for what? I wondered, but I knew they wouldn't tell me.

A chilly loneliness had settled around me, the way a winter fog settles in the ditches along the roads on the Eastern Shore. The silence deepened as we drove north to Canada and, a few days later, flew to England, my mother's birthplace. My mother and father shared a secret-I had known that from the day Ashley died. It was a secret that I was left to discover twelve years later, after both parents had disappeared from my life.