Here, in the cupboard under the stairs, was where Grey had layered the space with blankets and cushions and fairy lights, and read the Chronicles of Narnia to us every night for a year. Where I had pressed the pads of my fingertips into the plasticky bulbs of the lights as she read, and marveled at how the brightness shone through me, made fluorescent red by my blood, revealing capillaries and veins and all sorts of secrets beneath my skin.

Here, in the kitchen, was where she had cooked breakfast every Sunday morning, dancing around to the Smiths or the Pixies as she slammed through cupboards and left chalky storms of flour on the floor.

Here, in my bedroom, was where she had curled up next to me when I was sick and told me fairy stories about three brave sisters and the monsters they met in the dark.

Here, in her now-empty room, was where she had tacked the “Telltale Hand” palmistry guide poster above her bed and laden her shelves with salves and smudge sticks.

I sat on her bed for a long time, trying to remember what the room had looked like before she left. There had always been clothes scattered on the floor, and the bed was forever unmade. Tendrils of a wisteria vine had crept through her window and always seemed busy overtaking one corner of the room. A pink Himalayan salt lamp had sweated moisture onto her bedside table, curling the pages of her copy of A Practical Guide to the Runes, Grey’s favorite bedtime read. The dresser had been scattered with pouches of herbs, strings of crystals, and highlighted books on ancient Roman curse tablets.

All of it was gone now, and the girl was gone with them.

My mother was crying. It was not a new sound. It had been the backing track for much of my life. The house moaning in the wind and beneath it, my mother crying. I padded barefoot down the hall to her room, careful to avoid the creaky floorboard that would betray my presence. The door was open a crack; a slice of light jutted out. It was a tableau I recognized: Cate kneeling by her bed, the photograph of me and my sisters and my father in her hand. Her face was buried in her pillow as she sobbed, sobbed so hard I worried she would inhale fabric and feathers and choke.

In the afternoon, I sagged into my bed with my laptop and cycled between Twitter and Reddit and every news story I could find about Grey’s disappearance. It had exploded on social media. I followed hashtags and read deep into threads until my head ached with fullness, until my anxiety was a physical weight resting heavy inside my skull, until my body felt gouged out and desiccated. I picked my fingernails until they bled. I couldn’t breathe properly but I couldn’t stop reading and watching people’s reactions. Was it a publicity stunt or a hoax or a cry for attention or a misunderstanding or a murder or a suicide or a government conspiracy or aliens or a pact with the devil? I scrolled and clicked and consumed and filled myself and drained myself until I saw my mother pass my bedroom door around sunset, her scrubs on, her dark hair pulled back in her usual work bun.

I went to the hall and caught her at the bottom of the stairs. “You’re kidding me.”

“The world has to keep turning,” she said as she grabbed her car keys and made for the front door. The skin beneath her eyes was distended, her lips bee-stung.

“Why don’t you love her anymore?” I demanded, following her. “I mean, what could a seventeen-year-old girl have said to you that was so cruel it made you hate her?”

My mother stopped halfway out the door. I expected her to protest. I expected her to say I don’t hate Grey. I could never hate my own child. Instead, she said, “It would break my heart to tell you.”

I took a few deep breaths and tried to unravel what that meant. “Would you even care if she was dead?”

My mother swallowed. “No.”

I shook my head, horrified.

Cate came back to me then, pulled me into a hug, even as I feigned pushing her away. She was shaking, a frenetic energy humming though her. “I’m sorry,” she said to me. “I’m sorry. I know she’s your sister. I shouldn’t have said that.” I never felt more alien to Cate than when we were standing right next to each other, the height difference between us extreme. My small, sweet, blue-eyed mother, and then me, towering and angular. We were different species. “Don’t go anywhere tonight, okay? Please. Stay here. Stay inside. You know I can’t bear to lose you. I’m sorry . . . but I still have to go to work.”

And so she did. She left. I sunk onto the stairs, staring after her, a great twist of acid turning inside me. My scar was still itching from the velvet dress, so I dug my fingernails into it. There was a little hard nodule of scar tissue on one end now, inflamed by the rubbing fabric. I scratched it until it bled. The house felt too quiet, too filled with shadow and too many places for an intruder to hide. What if the masked man was already inside? What if he came during the night, while I was here on my own?

I checked Vivi’s location on my phone—she was still at the Lanesborough, still probably drinking at the bar. I hadn’t spoken to her all day. Vivi was volatile like that. She could be your best friend one moment, your coconspirator in all manner of mischief, then completely withdraw the next.

Another grim thought: Grey was the grounding force in our sisterhood, the sun we both orbited around. What would Vivi and I be without her? Would we drift apart in the cavernous space Grey left behind, rogue planets spun out into the abyss?

Would I lose both of my sisters at once?

When the doorbell rang, I thought it was Cate again, back to explain herself. I took my time getting to the door, opened it slowly.

“I need a drink,” Tyler Yang said as he pushed inside, walking straight past me without an invitation.

“Sure, come in, strange man I’ve only met once before,” I said after him, but Tyler had already found his way up the hall and into the kitchen. I heard cupboards banging, pots crashing. I closed the door and followed him inside.

“It’s above the fridge,” I said, my arms crossed as I watched him. He was more disheveled today, his black hair falling over his forehead, his skinny jeans ripped at the knees, but it worked. Even against the bland background of a suburban London kitchen, there was a swaggering, pirate-like energy to Tyler Yang, intensified by his smudged eyeliner, billowy floral shirt and leopard print House of Hollow trench coat that covered his tattooed arms. He was tall, lean. Inconveniently handsome.