My sister sighed, her glazed eyes far away. Probably seeing the tiny house where we’d once lived. Not having my sister’s memory, I knew it mostly from the crime scene photos. My parents’ bedroom, where the sole piece of furniture had been a dirty mattress placed directly upon the oak wood floor. The piles of dirty clothes, soiled linens, discarded food wrappings, that formed the perimeter of the space. Then a lone car seat, stuck in the corner, or at night, in the bedroom closet. The car seat where, according to the detectives’ reports, I had lived.

While Shana had slept with our parents on that bloodstained mattress.

“I loved you,” Shana stated now, her voice still dreamy. “Such a pretty baby. Mom would let me hold you. You’d smile at me, waving your pudgy little fists. I cut your wrist, very carefully, so you would know how much I loved you. Mom screamed, but you still smiled and I knew you understood.” Her voice turned mournful. “You shouldn’t have left me, Adeline. First Daddy, then you, and then it all went to shit.”

After our foster mother had discovered Shana slicing up my forearm with sewing shears, my six-year-old sister had been sent to a locked-down mental institute where she was placed on antipsychotic meds, while spending most of her days physically restrained to a bed. The regimen worked so well she only managed to attempt to kill a fellow patient five years later. Given that clear level of success, they declared her magically stable on her fourteenth birthday and turned her loose on an unsuspecting foster family. In my expert opinion, that she finally succeeded in killing someone was less a matter of if, than when.

“What do you think of,” I asked her now, “when you remember Daddy?”

“Love.”

“What do you hear?”

“Screams.”

“What do you smell?”

“Blood.”

“What do you feel?”

“Pain.”

“And that’s love?”

“Yes!”

“So when we were kids and you cut me, you just wanted me to know how much you loved me?”

“No. I wanted you to feel how much I loved you.”

“By cutting your baby sister.”

“Yes!”

“And if you had a knife right now?”

“Blood is love,” she intoned. “I know you know, Adeline. I know that in your heart of hearts, even you understand.”

Then she smiled, so slyly it sent a shiver through me. As if she knew exactly what I’d been doing six hours ago, a beast, driven by her nature, even as all her nurturing warned her to behave otherwise.

“What if I told you that food is love?” I said now, keeping my tone steady, my mind focused. “That instead of cutting someone, you should offer them bread?”

Shana frowned, touching her temples with her right hand. For the first time, she appeared confused, even disoriented. “Daddy never offered food.”

“What about Mom?”

“Mom?”

“Did Mom offer food?”