The paparazzi are staked out in front of the house, so my parents’ arrival as they make their way up the walk is accompanied by a series of loud clicks, and “What do you have to say?” and “Will you plead guilty?” and other questions to which I too would like to know the answers.

Once they are inside, my dad closes the door and puts his back up against it, like people do in horror movies. He rubs his cheeks a few times, slaps them as if to wake up, and then, without another word to me or to my mother, takes the stairs two at a time and disappears into their bedroom, slamming the door shut behind him.

I stand up and stare at my mother. She’s both familiar and foreign. Although it would have been impossible for her to have lost any real weight in the not quite twenty-four hours since I last saw her, she’s pale and looks somehow too thin. A plastic bag dangles from her wrist, her bathrobe stuffed inside, as she’s changed into the fleece pullover and jeans my dad must have brought to the courthouse. Her hair hangs limp around her face, the first time I’ve seen it air-dried in as long as I can remember.

I’ve occasionally caught my mother lifting the skin around her jawline and then letting it drop when she thinks no one is looking. In this unforgiving morning light, cold and sharp, I see what she’s been worried about: midlife jowls. Her face spilling off into a frown.

“Mom,” I say. I don’t know if I want to scream or cry, if I’m supposed to comfort her or she’s supposed to comfort me. I don’t understand how this is our real life, how we managed to screw everything up this much.

I keep my voice low. Isla is sleeping. She ended our joint vigil when we got the text that my mom had been granted bail.

“Processing will take a few hours. They won’t be home until crazy late,” she’d said, and like with everything else with my little sister, I wanted to ask How do you know that? Not for the first time, I thought about how Isla must have been given a manual at birth called How the World Works, and that someone had forgotten to slip me a copy. “Things are going to be a mess tomorrow. And for the foreseeable future. You should get some sleep, Chlo.”

She said this in her resigned, martyr-like Isla way, like she’s forty and not sixteen, and like she was born into this family against her better judgment.

“I’m going to wait up,” I said.