“I know.”

“I mean, what the fuck?”

“I know.”

“Iris, you’re not listening to me. What the fuck?”

“We need to get off the street,” I said as another woman did a double take at the sight of us. Someone might call the police, and I wasn’t sure how we’d explain our story. The missing sister, the dead body, the burned apartment, the gunshot wound, the armful of stolen artifacts. Even harder: the man in the skull, the flowers growing rampant in all the soft parts of a corpse. “Follow me.” I doubled back the way we’d come, partly to throw our pursuer off our track if he followed Vivi’s bloody trail, partly because I’d seen a café a hundred yards back that we could hide in.

It was small and dim inside, the floral wallpaper lit by apricot light bulbs that hung in jars from the ceiling. We slid into a booth at the back. My adrenaline was waning and my body had begun to ache all over. I’d landed badly on one ankle and a bright twist of pain bit at me whenever I put weight on it. The thatch of cuts I’d collected on my palms felt gritty and stung in the warmth of the café. There was glass in my hair, and blood on my hands, and the smell of death still pasted thick inside my nose.

Vivi and I put our salvaged items on the table between us. A leather-bound journal, the edges of its pages wet and flecked with blood. Scrunched, loose-leaf pages that had been torn from a notebook. A handful of drawings, each mostly destroyed now from blood and wet sidewalk and being clutched so tightly during our escape. We laid the drawings out first.

The first four were sketches for House of Hollow designs: Distorted, faceless figures sheathed in layers of dark fabric and feathers, the pencil strokes that made them frenzied. The last was something totally different: A depiction of a tumbledown house with broken windows and withered stone walls and a strip of tattered tartan fluttering from the front gate.

“I feel like I’ve seen this place before,” I said as I leaned over the table to study the picture more closely. The memory was grainy and coated in dust. Had I been there or had I seen it in a movie when I was little? “The fabric looks like it’s from the coat I was wearing the day we disappeared.”

“It is vaguely familiar,” Vivi agreed. “I guess.”

“Hang on,” I said as I snagged the notebook pages off the table. “This is Gabe’s handwriting.” I knew the tight coils of his writing instantly because I kept the card he’d made me for my fifth birthday in my bedside table. On the front was a hand-drawn iris flower, purple petals mid-bloom, and inside a short message about why I’d been called Iris: They had been his mother’s favorite flower.

“What does it say?” Vivi asked.

I scanned through the pages. They seemed like undated journal entries.

 My children are home. One week ago, this felt like an impossible fantasy. Now here we are.

“Oh my God,” I said. “It’s about us.” I kept reading.

 They don’t speak, except to whisper to each other. When we got back to London, they wandered around our house for an hour, as though they’d forgotten it. They won’t sleep in their rooms alone. They burrow under Grey’s bed and sleep together in a pile. I still have so many questions. What happened to them? Where were they? Did someone hurt them? For now, I am just happy they’re home.

I handed the first page to Vivi, then eagerly began reading the next, and the next, and the next.

 My daughters have been home for three weeks. I should be happy. I am happy . . . but I still can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong with them. Cate thinks I’m being paranoid. She’s probably right. What other explanation could there be?

 —

 Six weeks home today. They eat everything in sight. They’re like locusts. Last night, we ran out of food. We found them in the kitchen around 2:00 a.m., naked and shoveling handfuls of cat food into their mouths. They wailed and clawed at us when we tried to take it away from them. Cate cried and left them to it. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t be in the house anymore. I walked around Hampstead Heath until sunrise.

 —

 When they were gone, all I wanted was for them to be home. For them to be safe. Now they’re here, and all I have is bad thoughts. What’s wrong with me?

 —

 It has been three months. When they came back, they looked almost like my daughters, except for the teeth and the eyes. Now their hair is turning white. Why can’t Cate see what I see?

 —

 We used to be happy. Life wasn’t perfect or even easy. We weren’t rich and we had to work hard every day to support our children, but we were happy. I loved my wife. Cate was . . . effervescent. She had this high laugh like a tropical bird. We went to the movies on our first date and she laughed so hard and so loud that the rest of the theater laughed at her, and then with her. It was magical. I haven’t heard her laugh in months. She is so thin. She gives all her food to the children and barely eats anything herself. They are draining us of life.

 —

 Maybe I am going crazy. I feel like it. Cate thinks I am. My therapist thinks I am. He keeps telling me my theory is wrong and impossible, that it’s a manifestation of my PTSD. That my children are acting strangely because they also have PTSD.

 —

 There is something wrong with all of them, but especially with the one that looks like Grey. I am afraid of them. I am afraid of her. Where are my children? If these things are not my children, then what happened to my girls?

 —

 I have come to a terrible conclusion:

 My daughters are dead.

“Jesus,” Vivi said. “Talk about a descent into insanity.”