And then we were there. The street. The stone walls were close on both sides, and I could see all the way to the end. I could understand why the police thought it impossible for three children to disappear from right under their parents’ noses: because it was impossible.

“I know this place,” I said quietly. “We were here visiting our grandparents for Christmas. We were walking down this street right as the fireworks were going off. My parents were just behind us.” I ran my hands over the bricks. Being here felt wrong, like we were disturbing the dead. “This one,” I whispered, looking up at a stone terrace. It was newer than the others. The brick was milk and bone, not yet covered by centuries of grime. “This is the one.”

There was a bronze plaque set into the cobblestones to the right of the front door. Here, on this spot in January 2011, sisters Grey, Vivi, and Iris Hollow were found alive and well after being missing for 31 days. Our names had been burnished gold, presumably from all the tourists who came to this place and rubbed the bronze for luck.

The memories I had were slippery; they kept sliding through my mind, slightly different each time. I was no longer sure which ones were mine and which ones had been stitched in from elsewhere to make a more complete picture. Did I remember walking down this street that night? Or did I only remember coming back?

“It had burned down a few weeks before the night we went missing,” I said. “It was just a shell back then.”

Tyler nodded. “Yes, we’ve all seen the pictures.”

“There are pictures?”

Tyler stared at me. “You haven’t stalked yourself online?”

“I try to avoid reading anything about the catastrophic disaster that destroyed my family, actually.”

Tyler sighed, pulled out his phone, and googled hollow sisters disappearance.

The picture he showed me had been posted to r/UnsolvedMysteries on Reddit and appeared under the title I was in Edinburgh the day the Hollow sisters vanished and have a bunch of pictures from the street they were on when it (supposedly) happened. Thoughts? The poster went on to state that there was no way, in his humble opinion, that our parents’ story could possibly be true. His charming theory was that our mother had sold us to sex traffickers and then panicked and repurchased us a month later when the heat from the media got to be too much. While the hypothesis was bunk, the pictures of the street from that day seemed real enough. I thumbed through them and then scrolled down to read some of the comments.

I’m sorry, but there is just no way—NO FUCKING WAY—that three kids could disappear from this street if their parents were actually there watching them. I don’t know what they stood to gain or how they hid their daughters from police for a month, but Cate and Gabe Hollow were absolutely in on it.

    I’m willing to bet you don’t have children of your own. You can be actively watching your kids and then, poof, nothing. They are sneaky little bastards. Case in point: I have a three-year-old son. Yesterday, I was following behind him in the grocery store. (He likes to point at stuff on the bottom shelves and guess what it is. “Is this pasta? Is this pasta? What about this, is this pasta?” Newsflash, kid: Unless you’re in the pasta aisle, it’s usually not pasta. Hours of fun.) Anyway, he turns a corner into the next aisle, so I follow him—except he’s not there when I get there, or in the next aisle, or in the next aisle. I found him ten minutes later on a bench in the parking lot, waiting with a nice old lady. His disappearing act immediately made me think of the Hollow sisters and has honestly changed my mind about the case. My theory: The girls walked ahead of their parents, took a wrong turn, got lost, then got found by an opportunistic predator who got cold feet a month later.

    Yeah but there aren’t even any corners on this street. It’s not like they ran ahead and turned a corner and then they weren’t there. Cate Hollow has maintained that they disappeared from this street while she was on it. Two seconds, she says. For two seconds she turned her head to kiss her husband, and in that time, her three daughters vanished without so much as a peep? I’ll say it again. NO FUCKING WAY.

“I don’t need to read conspiracy theories about my parents,” I said as I handed Tyler’s phone back to him. “I can tell you right now: They weren’t involved.”

“Keep reading, would you?” Tyler insisted.

I scrolled down to the next comment thread.

Okay, the freestanding door is creepy af. How have I not seen this before?

    Reminds me of the search-and-rescue guy who posted about random staircases deep in the woods. Cate Hollow said the three girls were playing right near the burned-out house the last time she saw them. I wonder if that has anything to do with it?

    I can’t remember where the folklore is from exactly, but I’ve heard stories of people (mostly children) disappearing after walking through freestanding doors they found in the forest. There were ruins near my grandparents’ house growing up that we were banned from going near because three kids had disappeared from there over the years. Kids being kids, we went to investigate once and found nothing but a door just like the one in Edinburgh. We were so creeped out, we ran all the way home and didn’t go back.

    Reminder that this is a thread for genuine theories, not fairy tales. Let’s not let this devolve into a thread about alien abduction (again).

    Sure, sure. That being said . . . Anyone brave enough to try walking through it?

    Alas, it’s not there anymore. It was demolished a few weeks after the girls came back and has since been rebuilt. But yes, obviously, lots and lots of people walked through it in the month that the Hollow sisters were missing: police, volunteers, forensics, etc. Again, it’s not a door to Narnia.