My vitals are good—coffee and math have assisted in this—but Hannah’s are not. This is apparent as soon as I see her step out of Micah’s Jeep. I suspect she cried all the way down the freeway.

There is a part of me—irrational, I understand—that is surprised to see her. Somehow, in calling and not hearing from her and in calling Dad’s and Mom’s cells and not hearing from them, I started to think that Hannah had been caught in the wave, too. That, somewhere in Malaysia, my sister was floating facedown.

And so, when her feet hit the driveway, I run. Her mouth opens in an O, an expanding galaxy, because I am not given to displays of emotion and have never run toward her, just beside her, but I can’t help it when I throw my body against hers, which is much taller and softer than mine.

“You’re alive.”

I don’t know why I say this, because of course she is. I attribute this cognitive malfunction to a severe lack of sleep.

Nah cries harder, her whole body sagging against me, as though we are doing a trust exercise for AP Psych. I shift my weight as we start to fall, keeping us upright because she can trust me. I am working the problem. I will find them.

“We got here as fast as we could,” Micah says. “Fucking 405. You know.”

Nah pulls away, just a little. “Have you heard anything? Like, anything?”

I didn’t notice at first: the smell. In my rush to catch our fall, with my nose pressed against the clothes she left the house in yesterday, my olfactory system was hoodwinked. But the breath is an excellent carrier of alcoholic substances.

I check her pupils first: normal-sized. No opiates. But that just means no pills in the past few hours. I couldn’t check her pupils last night, because she didn’t come home. Didn’t check in.

I should have known. When she didn’t check in. But I trusted Micah—and I shouldn’t have.

I am perfectly capable of handling a natural disaster. My sister is another matter entirely. All those nights, holding back her hair. Lying to Mom and Dad for her when I caught her buying from Priscilla because, she promised, this was the last time. Becoming smaller to help make her feel bigger, talking less at the dinner table, after she made that joke that wasn’t a joke about how, since I’m six months older, I’m the heir and she’s the spare. “You’re the Elizabeth,” she said, “and I’m the Margaret.” I don’t read the magazines my sister does, but because of my extensive research for an AP Euro paper on sibling dynamics in the monarchies of Europe between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, I did get her reference about sibling rivalry in the House of Windsor.