“What?” I said, unmoving as she pulled my hand. “Your daughter is in the hospital and you’re going to leave?”

“Grey’s here. She’s safe. There’s nothing you can do for her overnight.”

“What if she wakes up all alone?” Vivi asked.

“She’s heavily sedated and will be kept that way until morning. You’re not going to miss anything by coming home.” Cate looked so tired. Her frown lines cut grooves through her forehead and gathered to a pinch above her nose. She was still dressed in the scrubs she’d worn to her last shift. She clasped my hands in her own and pulled me close. “Please. Please come with me. Don’t stay here.”

I glanced down at her bare neck and ran the pad of my thumb over her collarbone. I remembered the delicate necklace of bruising left on her throat the week after Grey left. I remembered how our next-door neighbor had come by during this time with mail that had been incorrectly delivered to his house and how, when Cate answered the door, he had let his eyes linger on the hickey-like thumbprint by my mother’s collarbone for too long, the slash of a smirk on his face, like he could judge the type of woman she was from this one small thing.

“Steer clear of him,” Cate had said when she closed the door, her skin flush with goose bumps.

It was the first time I had thought of my mother as a sexual creature. I was thirteen at the time and just coming to understand the power and treachery that came with breasts and hips and body hair. Men had begun catcalling me as I walked home from school in the afternoons—but that was my burden to bear. Seeing it done to my mother was something else.

It had made me angry, the look he’d given her. It had filled my stomach with blood and bile. The neighbor slipped in the bathtub that night, split his skull on the faucet, and spent the next week liquefying. His was the body I’d smelled, before the dead man in Grey’s apartment. I wondered, for a long time after he died, if my hatred of him had cursed him to death.

Part of me was horrified at the thought. Part of me hoped it was true.

“I’m not leaving her,” I said. “I can’t.”

Cate shook her head and left without saying another word, too exhausted to fight.

“That is some bullshit, right?” Vivi said. “There is some weird crap going on, but Grey is not crazy. We saw those dudes in her apartment. We saw a dead guy fall out of her ceiling. We saw her step through a doorway from somewhere else and end up in her burned-out kitchen.”

“Did we, though, Middle Hollow?” Tyler said. “I certainly didn’t. For all I know, she could have been curled up in a cupboard the whole time.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Vivi said. “I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes.”

“Do you think she’s ever coming back?” Tyler asked as Vivi stalked off. “Or is she skipping town to go and start a new family somewhere else?”

“I didn’t pin you for the daddy-issues type.”

A quick grin slipped across his lips. “No one who has a good relationship with their parents ever becomes a model. Even if they’re as ridiculously good-looking as me.”

“Did Grey ever talk to you about our parents?”

“Oh, dribs and drabs. Enough for me to know that she was afraid of your father and that she didn’t get along with your mother. Shocker.”

“It’s not that they don’t get along. It’s that Cate hates her.”

* * *

“You are not to speak to her,” my mother warned me the morning after she threw Grey out. “You are not to speak to her ever again.” I hated Cate a little bit for that. It seemed wholly unfair. The day before, we had been a (relatively) normal and happy family, and then all it took was a drunken whisper from Grey to tear it all apart. Now one of my sisters was gone and the other—though I didn’t know it yet—was already planning to go.

Vivi left in the middle of the night two weeks after Grey, without warning or fanfare. That was Vivi’s way. Grey was dramatic. Grey liked people to know when she entered and exited the room. Vivi was the opposite. She left with nothing but a backpack and her bass guitar, and left nothing behind to mark her departure except a note on the end of my bed. Sorry, kid, it read, but it’s just not the same if it’s not all three of us together. She caught a midnight Megabus to Paris, then spent the next three years making her way east, through the jazz clubs of France and the grungy nightclubs of Berlin and the absintheries of Prague and finally to the ruin bars of Budapest, collecting tattoos and piercings and languages and lovers along the way. It was rarely an easy, carefree life. We never talked about it, but I knew from Grey that Vivi had done things to get by. Pickpocketing tourists. Selling drugs. Working the odd shift at a strip club. At eighteen, when she moved into a converted warehouse overlooking the Danube with seven other musicians and artists, she had already lived and hurt more than most people do in a lifetime.

The first six months after Grey and Vivi left were the worst of my life. They were both mostly MIA, busy transforming themselves into the women they wanted to become. I heard from them only occasionally. A message here, a phone call there. It was like a piece of me had been cut away, two-thirds of my soul suddenly sloughed off.

It was also during those months that something changed in my mother. It was then that she started collecting newspaper clippings and police files from our case, started hiring private detectives to follow leads the cops couldn’t or wouldn’t or hadn’t. Before, it had been enough for her that we had come back. It didn’t matter where we’d gone or what had happened to us, so long as we were safe and whole and home. Then suddenly, overnight, she developed this burning desire to know. To know exactly. I would wake sometimes to find her standing in the doorway of my bedroom, watching me with quizzical eyes as I slept, as though searching for the answer to a question she was too afraid to ask out loud.

Please, I messaged Grey around the six-month mark. I need to see you.