This was nothing like that.

It had been the hardest month of my parents’ lives. It had twisted and cracked them, both individually and as a couple.

They blamed each other. They blamed themselves. It had been Gabe who’d pushed to go to Scotland to visit his parents over Christmas and New Year’s. It had been Cate who’d wanted to take us walking through the streets of Old Town at midnight so we could see the fireworks and the revelry. It had been Gabe who’d decided the route. It had been both of them who’d taken their eyes off us to share a midnight kiss.

His fault.

Her fault.

Their fault.

Our fault.

Hadn’t they taught us not to speak to strangers? Hadn’t they taught us not to wander off? Hadn’t they been hard enough? Soft enough? Enough, enough, enough?

In the days that followed, our grandparents’ home was searched for blood, signs of a struggle. Cadaver dogs slunk through the halls and bedrooms, hunting for death. The gardens in the backyard were dug up, destroyed. Their car was seized as possible evidence. Dozens of witnesses were interviewed to try and piece together a picture of what had happened earlier in the day. Nearby lochs were dredged for our bodies. My parents took lie-detector tests. They were fingerprinted. They were photographed. They were followed, by police and journalists alike. The press took pictures of them at their worst moments. If they cried too hard, people accused them of faking it. If they tried to keep it together, people accused them of being cold.

God help them if they smiled.

No one believed their story—and why would they? It was impossible. Who could snatch three children without being seen, being heard? Who could do that in a matter of seconds? They couldn’t leave Edinburgh without an answer either way. They couldn’t work. They couldn’t stay at my grandparents’ house now that it was the scene of a suspected crime. They spent all their savings on hotels and rental cars and billboards with our faces on them. They barely ate. They barely slept. They knocked on every door in the Old Town. They drifted through the streets desiccated by despair, oily and fetid and thin. They oscillated between comforting each other and hating each other for what had happened.

Their souls—and their marriage—came apart at the seams.

They were perhaps only a couple of days away from being arrested for our murders when they made their pact.

“If they’re dead,” Cate said to my father, “do we kill ourselves?”

“Yes,” Gabe replied. “If they’re dead, we do.”

A woman found us on the street that night, naked and shaken but unharmed. The papers that had hounded my parents apologized for libeling them and paid big out-of-court settlements for damages—enough to enroll us all in a fancy private school.

Gabe and Cate had never recovered. They had been wounded too deeply, and wounded each other too deeply in turn. The worse in for better or for worse had been so much heavier than either of them could have imagined.

Now my mother was reliving that same tragedy. I squeezed her hand; she squeezed mine back.

Then our part in the press conference was over. It had been decided that Vivi and I wouldn’t speak, that we would take the focus off Grey, so as we all got up to leave the room, the whole press galley was shouting, asking the questions they’d been dying to ask from the moment they saw us.

“Iris, Vivi, is there anything you want to say about what happened to you as children?”

“Will you be assisting in the investigation?”

“What really happened to you in Scotland?”

“Do you think Grey has been taken by the same people who took you the first time?”

“Cate! Cate! What do you say to the people who still think you’re guilty of kidnapping your own children ten years ago?”

I kept my head down, eyes on the floor, my gut filled with oil. Police waved us into the next room, a quiet haven away from the vultures. After the doors had closed behind us, my family broke apart without another word. Vivi made a beeline for the hotel bar. I went home with Cate, back to our big, empty house. My mother shut herself up in her dark room, and I was left alone, still wearing my missing sister’s clothes.

My phone pinged in my pocket. It had been going off pretty much nonstop since the first press release, with messages from teachers and the parents of girls I tutored and fellow students who’d never actually spoken to me face-to-face but who’d gotten my number off a friend of a friend so they could pass along their thoughts and prayers.

This new message was from an unknown number:

OMG babe, so horrible about Grey!

Hope they find her soon!

P.S. Did you manage to pass my modeling portfolio to her agent? I linked it to you on Instagram, remember? I haven’t heard anything back yet. They’re probably busy with all this missing-persons stuff, but just thought I’d check!

I couldn’t stand to have the velvet itching against my skin anymore, cutting a hot path against my scar. I slipped out of it in the hall, then balled it up in my shaking hands and screamed into the fabric. I wanted to destroy something beautiful, so I took the dress and ripped. As I did, a curl of paper, delicate as filament, fluttered from some hidden place inside a seam. I sank to the floor, my back against the wall, and unfurled it. The note was handwritten in Grey’s signature green ink.

 I’m a girl made of bread crumbs, lost alone in the woods. —GH

Yeah, Grey, I thought to myself. No shit.

* * *

What do you do when someone you love is missing? When all the looking you can do is done, what do you do in the long hours that linger ahead of you, heavy with absence and worry? Vivi’s answer was to get as drunk as possible for as long as possible, to disappear inside herself. My answer was to wander the floors of our house, dusting off memories of Grey in each room, Sasha trailing at my heels as though she could sense my grief and anxiety.