I take the dripping phone from her and steel myself. I’m not in the mood right now, but I know if I don’t pick up she’ll leave me one of those rambling, ten-minute voicemails which I still have to listen to, because sometimes she buries the one important thing right at the end like some kind of test.

I guess this is what happens when you’re the reliable daughter. Sometimes I can’t help but think how much easier it would be to be my sister.

I hit Accept.

“Mom?”

She doesn’t answer right away. There’s something about the pause, something about the way the air seems to crackle around me, that makes my stomach turn over and takes me back to fourteen months ago, when Mom rang to tell me about Dad. That same molasses, slow-motion feeling of reality slowing down. I steady myself. I’m just imagining it, I must be.

“Gillian,” she says finally, her voice clear but taut as a wire. “It’s your sister. She’s…” Mom inhales. “She’s gone.”

Gone? My mind whirls.

“What do you mean, gone? Gone where?”

Mom’s words come slowly, like she has to line them up in her head before she can speak them.

“Well, that’s just it, Gillian. We don’t know. She’s just…gone.”

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

I fire off questions to Mom that deep down I know won’t get answers. I’m backed up against the fridge door, leaning against its cold, hulking mass as though it can cool my suddenly overheated brain. Dinah frowns at me from her bar stool, looking concerned.

“I don’t know, Gillian,” Mom repeats. “All I know it what Dennis told me. Apparently your sister left the house this morning and hasn’t come home. Dennis says she left a note on the kitchen table.”

“Saying what?” I demand.

“Well, I don’t have it word for word, Gillian, but it sounded very odd to me. Something about ‘needing to do something.’ That there was somewhere she needed to go, and she couldn’t explain right now, but she’d be back.” She hesitates. “Dennis read it out to me. It sounded a bit, well, hyper, if you ask me. I’m not sure she was in the best state when she wrote it.”

Is Mom implying my sister was on some kind of medication, or drugs?

Was she?

I can’t say I really know much about how Abigail’s been doing lately. Now I wish I’d asked—but would she have told me if I had?

“What time this morning?” I say. “Why is Dennis only calling you now?”

I hear the crack of Mom’s lips parting and I realize how dry my own lips are, how parched my throat is. My brain seems to have dried out too—all I can feel is a faint whirring up there like a badly wired connection.