“Well, I’m cutting off her credit cards,” Dennis says. “I should have done that before.”

It feels surreal, this conversation—like my sister is a rat in a maze, some creature we’re trying to force down an exit route.

“Do you…do you think we should hire someone?” I say. I can’t believe I’m saying it. “Someone like a PI, I mean—a professional.”

There’s a silence at the other end of the line.

“I don’t know, Gillian,” he says after a while. “Maybe.”

We’re silent for a moment.

“What about Sam—do we tell him? About Miami, I mean?”

Dennis hesitates.

“Better not. Not until we know more.”

I nod, even though I know he can’t see it.

“Can I talk to him?” Dennis says.

I walk back into the kitchen and motion to Sam, who looks up from his phone.

“Your dad.”

He takes the phone, tentative.

“Hey Dad.”

I go over to where Mom’s standing by the kettle, her hands cupped around a mug. She raises her eyebrows at the look on my face.

“I’ll tell you outside,” I murmur, as Sam’s monosyllabic answers punctuate the conversation with his dad.

Miami, I think.

What is she doing?

*

Guess I picked the right sister, Oliver texts back when I message him about Dennis’s news. He can joke about it, but I can’t. Why hasn’t she even attempted to offer us any reassurances besides that note on the kitchen table claiming she’d be “back soon”?

A butternut squash risotto is cooking on the stove, and I sit at the kitchen table and stare out the window. Outside the storm is coming in as forecast, the sky a tender grey-purple. The first flakes are so delicate that it’s impossible to tell the exact moment it begins.

Life’s like that, isn’t it? You never see the beginning of things. Even looking back, sometimes it’s impossible to pinpoint. To say, there: that was the moment when everything changed.

I look out at the tree branches slowly frosting with snow, the harmony of light and dark. I think about how I could wind back the past like a film reel and still not know the starting points of any of the things that have changed my life. Like this chasm between my sister and me—when exactly did that begin? When did our family become the way it became?

As impossible as pinpointing the moment you fall in love, or the moment that love ends. Most of the time there’s no clear before and after when your world changes—only a slow landslide, quiet as a lullaby.