I caught sight of my reflection in a vending machine. There were dark grooves beneath my eyes, a smudge of dried blood on my cheek. I licked my thumb and wiped the red away.

Outside, three floors below, I could hear the distant click of cameras, the murmur of the growing crowd who’d come to see the missing supermodel, who—for the second time in her life—had been spat back from the abyss. I stood and stretched, then went to the window and parted the blinds to glance out at the swelling mass of fans and well-wishers. They noticed me immediately and turned their phones and cameras my way. A restless field of stars blinking in the dusk.

It had been a confusing, scary afternoon. Getting Grey to the closest hospital had been . . . a challenge. We’d removed the police tape over her apartment door and carried her down the stairwell to the street below. Vivi tried to call an ambulance, but Grey—bleeding, gaunt, and barely able to stand—had pushed us off, thrown Vivi’s phone into the road, and screamed at us to listen, listen. When we’d hailed a cab to get her to the hospital ourselves, Grey had gone wild. There was still a fizzy sting of pain where she’d scratched my cheek, my neck, my arms as I helped Vivi and Tyler hold her down in the back of the taxi. “We have to run, we have to run, we have to run,” she’d chanted, kicking and bucking against us as we struggled to force her into the emergency room. We were all covered in scratches and bite marks and blood by the time doctors and nurses and security came rushing over to help restrain her.

The police had come, called by someone, and we’d each given short statements as nurses swabbed our wounds and gave us ice packs for our bruises. Yes, we’d really found her in her burned-out apartment. No, we didn’t know how she’d gotten there, or how long she’d been there for.

Then we waited. Waited for news of what the hell had happened to her, waited to hear if she was okay. Waited, along with the rest of the world, to find out the answer to the mystery. Where had she been? For the first time, I understood why people were obsessed with us, why there were Reddit boards with hundreds of comments trying to unravel the answer.

I let the blinds slip closed and went back to the vending machine. I was halfway through my sixth packet of chips when a doctor finally appeared, a young South Asian woman in glasses and a green checked shirt.

I stood quickly. “Is she okay?” I asked. “Can we see her?”

“Mrs. Hollow,” the doctor said to my mother. “My name is Dr. Silva. Perhaps we could speak privately?”

“I don’t think so, Doogie Howser,” Vivi said. “We want to know what’s going on.”

Cate nodded. “It’s fine.”

Dr. Silva looked hesitant but spoke anyway. “Your daughter is stable,” she said. I couldn’t help but notice the way my mother’s lips pursed on the word daughter. “We’ve sedated her to help her rest. Whatever happened to her, it’s over now. She’s safe.”

Safe. Grey was safe. Somewhere, in a room tucked off a corridor around the corner, my sister’s heart was beating.

The bones went out of my legs, like some tether inside me had been cut. I sank down into the chair behind me and looked at my hands, at the broken pinkie I shared with Grey. It had taken months to heal, a bruised, fat sausage where a finger had once been. Even now, when I ran my thumb over it, the joints beneath were bulbous, bent out of shape.

Grey was alive. Grey was back.

Relief flooded my body with such force that I gasped and laughed at the same time. With it came a surge of memories. The night my pet guinea pig died, Grey curled up in bed next to me, teaching me to meditate. Her body next to my body, her lips against my ear, her fingertips trailing down my nose as she taught me to breathe in for seven, hold for seven, breathe out for seven. The day that Vivi bit my arm so hard she broke the skin, so Grey bit her back as punishment. The night Grey pulled me onto the dance floor at a school dance and led me in an exaggerated tango, spinning me so fast I could feel gravity trying to wrest us apart, but our hold on each other was so strong I knew no force in the universe could separate us.

“What happened to her?” I asked as I wiped mist from my eyes.

Dr. Silva glanced at my mother. “As best we can tell, it seems as though your sister is in the grips of a particularly severe psychotic episode. During psychosis, the mind finds it extremely difficult to separate what is real and what is not. Hallucinations and delusions are common. It could explain why she’s been off the grid for a week.”

Vivi bristled. “You immediately assume she’s crazy?” she snapped. “We found her cowering and covered in blood. She could have been taken by someone, she could’ve—”

“Grey believes she was kidnapped and dragged through a door to another realm by a horned beast, where she was held captive,” the young doctor continued gently. “She believes she managed to escape, but that this creature—again, for emphasis, a fairy-tale creature—is coming for her. She also believes you—her sisters—are in mortal danger. She told us this herself.”

“I want to see her,” Vivi said as she pushed past her, but the doctor stopped my sister with a hand on her shoulder.

“You don’t. Not right now. We had to restrain her. You don’t want to see her like that, I promise you. Your sister is sick. Her mind and body are exhausted. Now, there is a police officer posted at her door for her protection, more police downstairs to keep the press at bay. Even if someone did wish her harm, they wouldn’t be able to get to her. Let her rest tonight. Talk to her tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” Cate said as she pulled Vivi back. “We’ll let her sleep.”

“Wait,” I said. “Whose blood was she covered in?”

Dr. Silva turned back to look at me. “It was her own. There are cuts on her forearms, some so deep they needed stitching. Self-harm.”

“You’re both coming with me,” Cate said as she shrugged on her coat. “I don’t want you here tonight.”