Sowell Bay High School is the local school attended by Daphne Cassmore, Erik Sullivan, and Simon Brinks, and its Class of 1989 becomes a crucial archive of connections that were never fully understood. The school itself remains largely offstage: Cameron Cassmore and Tova Sullivan encounter it through a ring, photographs, and a yearbook, material traces that turn a place from their past into evidence for questions about family and identity.

School and the Class of 1989

The school is most distinctly identified through its graduating class. Cameron finds the inscription SOWELL BAY HIGH SCHOOL, CLASS OF 1989 on a heavy class ring wrapped in an old photograph. The date matters to his search: he is thirty, and his mother, Daphne, would have become pregnant in the same summer that these students graduated. The class is therefore not just a historical cohort; it is the setting for a personal chronology Cameron is trying to reconstruct.

The school’s old records also acquire a present-day audience. As Cameron discovers, the Class of 1989 has a substantial online presence, helped by an upcoming thirty-year reunion. Someone has scanned and uploaded what appears to be the entire senior yearbook. Cameron searches those grainy pages for his mother and, more urgently, for the unfamiliar man pictured with her. The reunion archive connects an approaching public commemoration to his private effort to identify his father.

The Yearbook as an Archive

The same yearbook serves two different searches. Cameron uses the online scans as a visual record, looking for the man in a worn photograph he found with the ring. A picture of Daphne on a crowded pier, with the man’s arm around her and his face turned into her windblown hair, confirms that he has found the same person. Its caption supplies a name: Simon Brinks. The school’s record thus gives Cameron more than an image; it turns an unknown face into a person he can seek out.

For Tova, the yearbook is a physical book kept in the attic among piles of linen and china. She has returned to it before, sometimes with her husband, Will, when nostalgia stirred, and she knows the photographs of her son Erik by heart. This time, however, she is searching for Daphne. With readers on and her fingers following the tiny index, she finds only one entry: Daphne A. Cassmore, listed on pages 14, 63, and 148. The familiar book has become an index to a different, long-hidden part of the past.

Rings, Photographs, and Identification

The class ring links Cameron’s investigation to the school’s physical and digital records. When he turns it over, he finds EELS engraved on its underside. He initially interprets the letters as an unusual school mascot, reasoning that an eel might suit a school near the water. That reading is mistaken, but the engraving still ties the ring to Sowell Bay High School and keeps the object central to his search.

The school’s records also establish that Cameron’s first identification is not the one he hopes for. When he meets Simon, Cameron asks whether Simon had slept with Daphne. Simon denies it and offers to take a cheek swab, confident about the answer. He brings out his own Class of 1989 yearbook and another ring, allowing Cameron to compare it with the ring he brought. The rings feel identical in weight, yet Cameron senses that something is wrong. The school’s memorabilia makes the connection between Simon and Daphne visible, but it does not by itself settle Cameron’s parentage.

A Place Reached Through Its Traces

The school’s role is mediated by objects rather than by a narrated return to its classrooms. Its yearbook moves between settings: a scanned archive that Cameron searches, an old volume Tova finds in her attic, and the battered hardcover Simon keeps with other high-school material in an unfinished storage space. In each instance, the book carries the past into a present-day encounter. The school is less a backdrop for action than a source of records that different people read for different reasons.

The ring’s later appearance sharpens that role. After Cameron throws it into the wolf-eel tank, Tova finds it on the floor beside Marcellus, the octopus, and reads the school and class engraving. She wonders whether it could be Daphne’s, then recognizes that it is a man’s ring and connects it to Cameron’s belief that it belonged to his father. The school inscription, which first helped Cameron pursue Simon, also brings the object into Tova’s understanding of the family mystery. Sowell Bay High School therefore anchors several partial investigations: its records reveal a shared past, while the meanings of the evidence they preserve remain unsettled until the people around it can make the connections.