Something was off. The cat hadn’t been allowed outside for probably ten years.

“Cate?” I called quietly as I pushed the door open and stepped inside. I couldn’t remember when or why we’d stopped calling our mother Mum, but Cate preferred it this way, and it had stuck.

There was no answer. I put Sasha down and scuffed off my muddy shoes. Soft voices echoed down the stairs from the floor above, snippets of an odd conversation.

“That’s the best you can do?” my mother asked. “You can’t even tell me where they went? How it happened?”

A tinny speakerphone voice responded: a man with an American accent. “Listen, lady, you don’t need a PI, you need a psychiatric intervention.”

I followed the voices, my footfalls quiet. Cate was pacing by her bed, still in her emergency room scrubs, the top drawer of her nightstand open. The room was dark, lit only by a dim honey lamp. Night shift at the hospital called for blackout curtains, so the space always had a slightly sour smell to it from the constant lack of sunlight. In one hand, Cate held her phone. In the other, a photograph of herself with a man and three children. This happened every winter, in the weeks following the anniversary: My mother hired a PI to try and solve the mystery the police were no closer to unraveling. Inevitably, the PI always failed.

“So that’s it, then?” Cate asked.

“Jesus, why don’t you ask your daughters,” the man on the phone answered. “If anyone knows, it’s them.”

“Fuck you,” she said sharply. My mother rarely swore. The wrongness of it sent a prickle into my fingertips.

Cate hung up. A glottal sound escaped her throat. It was not the kind of noise you’d make in the presence of others. I was immediately embarrassed to have stumbled on something so private. I went to turn away, but the floorboards creaked like old bones beneath my weight.

“Iris?” Cate said, startled. There was a prick of something odd in her expression when she looked up at me—anger? fear?—but it was quickly replaced with concern when she spotted my muddy leggings. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

“No, I was mauled by a rabid pigeon.”

“And you were so scared that you shat your pants?”

I threw her a very funny pout. Cate laughed and perched on the edge of her bed and beckoned me with both hands. I went and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her so she could fix my long blond hair into two braids, as she had done most mornings since I was little.

“Everything okay?” I asked as she ran her fingers through my hair. I caught the prickly chemical scent of hospital soap, overlaid with sweat and bad breath and other telltale hints of a fifteen-hour shift in the emergency room. Some people thought of their mothers when they smelled the perfume she wore when they were children, but for me, my mother would always be this: the cornstarch powder of latex gloves, the coppery tang of other people’s blood. “You left the front door open.”

“No, I didn’t. Did I? It was a long shift. I spent a long time with a guy who was convinced his family was controlling him with anal probes.”

“Does that count as a medical emergency?”

“I think I’d want some pretty rapid intervention if that was happening to me.”

“Fair point.” I sucked my bottom lip and exhaled through my nose. It was better to ask now, in person, than over text later. “Is it okay if I go out tonight? Vivi’s in town for a gig and Grey is flying in from Paris. I want to spend time with them.”

My mother said nothing, but her fingers slipped in my hair and tugged hard enough to make me gasp. She didn’t apologize.

“They’re my sisters,” I said quietly. Sometimes, asking to see them—but especially asking to see Grey—felt like asking for permission to take up shooting heroin as an extracurricular activity. “They aren’t going to let anything bad happen to me.”

Cate gave a short, complicated laugh and started braiding again.

The picture she’d been looking at was facedown on the blanket, like she hoped I wouldn’t notice it. I turned it over and studied it. It was of my mother and my father, Gabe, and the three of us girls when we were younger. Vivi wore a green tweed duffle coat. Grey was dressed in a Bordeaux faux-fur jacket. I was in a little red tartan coat with gold buttons. Around each of our necks hung matching gold heart pendants with our names pressed into the metal: IRIS, VIVI, GREY. Christmas presents from the grandparents we had been in Scotland to visit when the photo was taken.

The police had never found these items of clothing or jewelry, despite extensive searches for them.

“It’s from that day,” I said quietly. I hadn’t seen any photographs from that day before. I hadn’t even known there were any. “We all look so different.”

“You can . . .” Cate’s voice split, fell back down her throat. She let out a thin breath. “You can go to Vivi’s gig.”

“Thank you, thank you!”

“But I want you home before midnight.”

“Deal.”

“I should make us something to eat before you go to school, and you should definitely have a shower.” She finished my braids and kissed me on the crown of my head before she left.

When she was gone, I looked at the photograph again, at her face, at my father’s face, only a handful of hours before the worst thing that would ever happen to them happened. It had carved something out of my mother, shaved the apples from her cheeks and left her thinner and grayer than before. For much of my life, she had been a watercolor of a woman, sapped of vibrancy.

It had carved even more out of Gabe.

Yet it was the three of us girls who’d changed the most. I hardly recognized the dark-haired, blue-eyed children who stared back at me.

I’ve been told we were more secretive after it happened. That we didn’t speak to anyone but each other for months. That we refused to sleep in separate rooms, or even separate beds. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, our parents would wake to check on us and find us huddled together in our pajamas, our heads pressed together like witches bent over a cauldron, whispering.