Our eyes turned black. Our hair turned white. Our skin began to smell like milk and the earth after rain. We were always hungry, but never seemed to gain weight. We ate and ate and ate. We even chewed in our sleep, grinding down our baby teeth and sometimes biting our tongues and cheeks, so we woke with bloodstained lips.

Doctors diagnosed us with everything from PTSD to ADHD. We collected an alphabet of acronyms, but no treatment or therapy ever seemed to be able to reset us to how we’d been before it happened. We weren’t sick, it was decided: We were just strange.

People always found it hard to believe now that Grey and Vivi and I had come from our parents.

Everything about Gabe Hollow had been gentle, except for his hands, which were rough from his work as a carpenter and his weekend hobby of throwing mugs on a potter’s wheel. He’d worn cozy clothing from charity stores. His fingers were long and felt like sandpaper when he held your hand. He never watched sports or raised his voice. He caught spiders in plastic containers and carried them out to the garden. He talked to his kitchen herbs when he watered them.

Our mother was an equally soft woman. She drank everything—tea, juice, wine—only from the mugs my father had made for her. She owned three pairs of shoes and wore muddy Wellingtons as often as she could. After it rained, she picked up snails from the sidewalk and moved them to safety. She loved honey—honey on toast, honey on cheese, honey stirred into her hot drinks. She sewed her own summer dresses from patterns handed down to her by her grandmother.

Together, they’d worn waxed Barbour jackets and preferred walking in the English countryside to traveling overseas. They’d owned wooden hiking poles and hand reels for fishing in streams. They’d both loved to wrap themselves in wool blankets and read on rainy days. They both had light blue eyes, dark hair, and sweet, heart-shaped faces.

They were gentle people. Warm people.

Somehow, combined, they’d produced . . . us. We were each five eleven, a full ten inches taller than our tiny mother. We were each angular, elongated, sharp. We were each inconveniently beautiful, with high cheekbones and eyes like does. People told us as children, told our parents, how exquisite we were. The way they said it, it sounded like a warning—which, I supposed, it was.

We all knew the impact of our beauty and we all dealt with it in different ways.

Grey knew her power and brandished it forcefully, in a way I had seen few girls do. In a way I was afraid to mirror myself, because I had witnessed the repercussions of being beautiful, of being pretty, of being cute, of being sexy, and of attracting the wrong kind of attention, not only from boys and men but other girls, other women. Grey was an enchantress who looked like sex and smelled like a field of wildflowers, the human embodiment of late-summer evenings in the South of France. She accentuated her natural beauty wherever possible. She wore high heels and delicate lace bras and soft smoky eye makeup. She always knew the right amount of skin to show to achieve that cool-sexy look.

More than anything else, this is how I knew my eldest sister was different from me: She walked home alone at night, always beautiful, sometimes drunk, frequently in short skirts or low-cut tops. She walked through dark parks and down empty streets and along graffiti-smeared canals where itinerants clustered to drink and do drugs and sleep in piles. She did this without fear. She went to the places and wore the things that—if anything happened to her—would later prompt people to say she was asking for it.

She moved through the world like no other woman I knew.

“What you don’t understand,” she said to me once when I told her how dangerous it was, “is that I am the thing in the dark.”

Vivi was the opposite. She tried to banish her beauty. She shaved her head, pierced her skin, inked the words FUCK OFF! across her fingers, a spell to try and ward off unwanted desire from unwanted men. Even with these enchantments, even with a zigzag nose and a wicked tongue and unshaved body hair and the dark grooves beneath her eyes carved out by drink and drugs and sleepless nights, she was achingly beautiful, and ached after accordingly. She collected each wolf whistle, each smacked butt cheek, each groped breast, kept them all beneath her skin where they boiled in a cauldron of rage that she let out onstage on the strings of her bass guitar.

I fell somewhere between my sisters. I didn’t actively try to wield or waste my beauty. I kept my hair washed and wore no scent but deodorant. I smelled clean but not intoxicating, not sweet, not tempting. I wore no makeup and only loose-fitting clothing. I didn’t take up the hem of my uniform. I didn’t walk alone at night.

I went to put the photograph back in Cate’s open drawer. A manila folder, distended with paper, sat beneath her socks and underwear. I pulled it out, flicked it open. It was filled with photocopies of police files, their edges curled with age. I saw my name, my sisters’ names, caught snippets of our story as I riffled through, unable to look away.

The children claim to have no memory of where they have been or what happened to them.

Officer █████ and Officer █████ refuse to be in the same room as the children, citing shared nightmares after taking their statements.

The flowers found in the children’s hair are unidentifiable hybrids—possible pyrophytes.

The cadaver dogs continue to react to the children even days after their return.

Gabe Hollow insists that all three children’s eyes have changed, and that baby teeth have grown back in places where they were already lost.

My stomach pressed against my throat. I snapped the folder shut and tried to shove it back into the drawer, but it snagged on the wood and split open, heaving paper onto the floor. I knelt and gathered the sheets into a pile with shaking hands, trying not to look at its contents. Pictures, witness statements, pieces of evidence. My mouth was dry. The paper felt corrupted and wrong in my fingers. I wanted to burn it, the way you’d burn a blighted crop so the rot couldn’t spread.

And there, at the top of the stack of documents, I found a photograph of Grey at eleven years old, two white flowers—real, living flowers—growing out of the paper as if they were bursting from her eyes.