It happened quickly, the unraveling of Gabe Hollow. When we first returned after our kidnapping, he’d been exuberant. He’d swept us into his arms, a grown man turned to wet pulp by the miraculous return of his three daughters.

He was the one who noticed something wrong with my teeth and eyes, before we even left Scotland. He took me back to the police station without telling my mother and explained the strange problem to the detectives who handled our case: “One month ago, on the night before she disappeared, Iris lost her two front wiggly baby teeth on a hard candy cane. She had been so excited,” he told them. Seven was old to lose your first tooth and I had been enthusiastic to finally meet the tooth fairy.

“So what’s the problem, then?” the detectives asked.

“Look at her teeth now,” my father said, pulling my top lip up as he pushed me in front of them. “Look at them.” My mouth was full. I had no gaps. The teeth I had lost had grown back, but they’d grown back as baby teeth, teeth I would lose again only a few months later. “Look at her eyes, too,” Gabe insisted. “My daughters all have blue eyes; this child’s eyes are black.”

I blinked a few times at the detective, who smiled at me sadly.

“You have your daughters back, Gabe,” she said as she closed the file in front of her. “You got the one-in-a-million, impossible happy ending. Go home.”

And so we did go home, and for a little while, everything was fine. Gabe was a tall man and his skin was always warm, and in the weeks that followed our return, I grew extra attached to him, grew fond of curling up on his lap and falling asleep in his arms. I liked to push his hair back off his forehead and study the soft features of his face, and when he got up to go anywhere, I liked to go with him, my arms wrapped tight around his neck. For a time, Gabe liked the attention. “My little leech,” he called me.

I can’t say for sure when exactly his mind began to slip, though I suspect it was our hair changing color that first triggered him. All three of us had dark hair as children, like our parents, but in the weeks after we came back, it lightened to white-blond. It wasn’t unheard-of for those who’d suffered a severe trauma to spontaneously develop white hair over a short period of time. It even had a name: Marie Antoinette syndrome, named for the queen whose hair supposedly turned stark white the night before her appointment with the guillotine. It was unusual and extremely rare, doctors said, but nothing to be concerned about.

Life continued on. We went back to school. Gabe seemed wary around us. He didn’t like to have me on his lap anymore, didn’t like my little arms clasped around his throat. Something sour and treacherous began to sink into him. I don’t know how he came to the idea that we were impostors, whether it was a fairy tale from his childhood that made sudden sense or he read it on a conspiracy-theory forum, but it settled into his head and collected there like dust, until it coated everything.

Even when doctors told him our change in eye color had a name too—aniridia, the absence of an iris, a disorder caused by blunt trauma—Gabe had already made up his mind.

“What if Papa was right?” I said.

“Right about what?” Vivi picked up the sheets of paper and shook them in my face. “These are the deranged ramblings of a madman.”

“Well, what happened to us, then, Vivi? What happened to us? Yes, okay, maybe Gabe went crazy, but something triggered that. Who took us? Where did we go?”

“I don’t know!” Vivi snapped. She threw the papers on the table. “I need a drink.”

“Maybe if you dealt with what happened to you as a kid,” I said, unable to look at her, “you wouldn’t need to numb yourself with drugs and booze.” We all had different ways of coping, but Vivi’s were the most destructive, filled with powders and poisons designed to lessen the pain of a tragedy we didn’t understand.

My sister was silent. I chanced a glance at her. Vivi stared at me with cool slate eyes, her bottom jaw set forward so her lips gathered into a scowl. “Maybe if you dealt with what happened to you as a kid,” she said, “your mother wouldn’t be your only friend.”

I let out a long breath, all the fight suddenly gone from me. “Let’s not do this.”

“Well, don’t come in with a big swinging dick accusing me of being an alcoholic.”

“You are an alcoholic.”

“Oh, screw you, Miss Perfect.”

“Please, Vivi. Christ. Let’s not fight about this right now.”

“Whatever. Fine. You started it.”

We flicked through the journal together. It was filled with newspaper clippings and printouts of news stories. At the beginning, they were all about us, all written during our disappearance. I’d avoided reading much about our case. I thought we all had. Apparently, I was wrong.

“Wow, she was obsessed,” Vivi said as she turned the pages. “She never talked about it. She never wanted us to talk about it either. And the whole time she was scrapbooking like a bored housewife?”

The rest of the articles and Wikipedia printouts were about other missing people, all of whom, like us, had disappeared under strange circumstances. Grey had highlighted and underlined and made notes in the margins. Things like:

Same? Unlikely. Probably murdered.

 Just one door, or many?

 Hard to replicate. Fluke? Maybe my memories aren’t real?

 I want to go back!

 Nothing in common.

 How many come home? V. few. Maybe none?

 Night? Three sisters? Scotland?

 Liminality! NYE. Dusk, dawn, etc. Time when veil is thin.

 If my memories are true-what does that make me?

 Broken doors!

 Go back to Scotland? (What if I can’t get back?)

 WHAT DID I DO?