He found the booze stash, picked the gin, and then took a long swig right from the bottle.

“Charming,” I said.

“Your sister is Gone Girl–ing me, I bloody know it,” Tyler said as he paced the kitchen, gin bottle still in hand.

“What are you talking about?”

“She’s faking it! I’m gonna go down for this and that’s exactly what she wants.” He took another long swig, then stopped, eyes darting from side to side in mad thought. “Does England have the death penalty?”

“Wait, you think Grey is faking her disappearance to . . . punish you?”

“Would you put it past her?”

I thought of how Justine Khan had shaved her head in front of the whole school. I thought of the male teacher Grey didn’t like, the one who kissed her in front of her class and got fired for it. I thought of how he’d insisted that he hadn’t wanted to do it, that she had whispered in his ear and made him. Grey Hollow did have a slightly warped sense of crime and punishment, and a way of making bad things happen to people who crossed her.

Tyler was pacing again. “A lot of strange shit happens around that woman. An unnatural amount of strange shit!”

I sighed. I knew.

“The police went to my flat while I was out, you know,” he continued. “Apparently, they have an arrest warrant.” He sniveled. “It’s trending on Twitter.”

I checked; it was.

“They’ve got something on you?” I asked.

Another muffled sob. Another swig of gin. “Hell if I know.”

“So you came . . . here? When the police are about to charge you with . . . what, my sister’s murder?”

Tyler pointed the gin bottle at me, his fingers dripping with thin silver rings. “You know I didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance. I can see it in your eyes. You know something, Little Hollow. Tell me.”

I shook my head. “We thought we knew something. We thought it might somehow be linked to what happened to us as kids, but . . . we’ve got nothing.”

“Fuck!” Tyler ran his hand through his hair, sweeping it back out of his face, then sank onto the kitchen floor, his head bobbed forward onto his chest and both arms limp at his sides. I went and crouched in front of him. Up close, I caught the stink of gin and weed and vomit, and wondered how drunk and high he already was when he got here.

“You knew her, Tyler,” I said.

He shook his droopy head. “I don’t know if anyone ever really knew her,” he said, his words slurred.

“Think. Think hard. Is there anything you can tell me, anything at all, that might be a good place to start? A name, a location, a story she told you?” I waited for a full minute, then shook his shoulder, but he flopped a hand in my direction with a whimper and then slumped back against the cupboard, unconscious.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said as I stood up.

Tyler was too heavy for me to move, so I found a spare blanket and pillow in the linen closet and left him there, sprawled out on my kitchen floor.

* * *

I woke on Saturday morning to the taste of blood and the smell of sweat and alcohol. There was a deep, jagged hunger inside me; I’d been chewing on my cheeks and tongue in my sleep. The blood was my own. It had dried on my lips, dripped onto the pillowcase. The smell of sweat and alcohol came from Vivi, still dressed in what she wore to the press conference yesterday, her makeup a cracking fresco on her skin. Her warm body was curled around me, one of her legs draped over my hip bones.

It had been a strange, sleepless night. The hours had clumped together and then fallen away in great chunks. I had only managed to close my eyes as sunrise blanched the winter sky. In the end, I had been grateful for Tyler Yang’s uninvited presence. Checking on him throughout the night to make sure he hadn’t choked on his own vomit gave me something to do that wasn’t worrying about Grey. The news of Tyler’s arrest warrant had spread fast and far on the internet, and I fell from one rabbit hole to the next reading about him, about his relationship with my sister and his career and his past. Which inevitably brought me to the tragic story of Rosie Yang.

I had been sitting on the kitchen floor next to Tyler when I came across the headline.

DROWNING HORROR:

 WITNESSES TELL OF HAUNTING SCENES AS GIRL, 7, DIES ON FAMILY TRIP TO BEACH

I picked my fingernails while I read. It had happened years ago, when Tyler was five, at a busy seaside town in midsummer. There had been a heat wave. The beach had been packed with thousands of people escaping the sticky heat. Tyler and his older sister had wandered off from their parents and been found floating facedown in the surf not long after. Tyler was revived on the scene. Rosie could not be resuscitated and was pronounced dead at the hospital.

The article included a picture of her from her birthday party the week before. A little girl in a yellow sundress with the same black hair as Tyler’s, the same impish grin, the same dimples.

I had put my palm against Tyler’s chest as he slept and felt the steady rise and fall of his rib cage, the strong beat of his heart, and imagined the scene on the beach that day. The hands of a lifesaver against his chest, the compressions so deep they splintered his thin ribs. The bare, wet skin of his back pushed into the hot sand as onlookers crowded around, pressing their fingers to their mouths and holding their own children back so they couldn’t see. His parents hovering over him, hovering over his sister, barely able to breathe through the pain and the hope and the wanting. One child sputtering water from his lungs, a sudden intake of breath. The other limp, blue, cold.

Tyler Yang was confident and cocky and cavalier. Tyler Yang did not seem like a man with a tragic past. Yet the worst thing that I could imagine happening, the thing that was maybe happening to me right now—losing a sister—had happened to him already. He was a grim testament to a truth I knew but refused to acknowledge: that it was possible to suffer devastating, incomprehensible loss and continue to live, to breathe, to pump blood around your body and supply oxygen to your brain.