Mae cocks her head to the side, in that birdlike way of hers, eyes narrowing. Checking my pupils.

“No,” she says.

We don’t talk for the rest of the night.

On day three, Mae and I start filling out a missing persons report for the International Red Cross.

And it’s here, at seventy-two hours, that I realize something:

The forgetting begins almost immediately.

Nobody tells you that.

The stuff they ask you about is the kind of thing they would ask when your missing person is probably not a person anymore. Otherwise, why would they want to know about scars and jewelry and tattoos—they say it’s so much easier to identify the body if the person has tattoos. Dad doesn’t have any tattoos. Nobody can remember which ankle Mom’s Om is on.

We don’t have pictures of Mom’s feet. Why don’t we have a single picture of her feet? Her feet in the sand or on her yoga mat or propped up on the coffee table when she’s reading one of those murder mysteries she likes.

“I think it was on her right ankle,” Mae says, scrolling through the yoga photos on Mom’s website. In all the pictures she’s wearing leggings that cover her ankles. “But it doesn’t matter because they’ll just be looking for a tattoo and see it and then—”

“But what if someone else has an Om tattoo on her ankle?” I say. “I mean, it’s a common symbol, yeah? And the shape of her ears—are they serious? I don’t even know the shape of my own ears.”

Mae rubs her eyes, then slides her hands down her face. “Birthmarks?”

“Dad has that one on his back,” I say. “Remember that time Gram told him to have it looked at because she thought it was cancerous, and Dad explained, like, the entire history of skin cancer to her and she still made him go to the doctor?”

“And she said it was shaped like Italy,” Mae says. “I remember that. Should I write it down like that? Shaped like Italy?”

I nod, then close my eyes and try to remember my mother’s ears. I’m such a horrible daughter. What kind of person doesn’t remember what her mom’s ears look like? I mean, really? Did I ever even see her—like really see her?

When we’re done, Mae takes the papers to Dad’s office to scan and send them to the Red Cross.

It’s been over five months since I’ve slipped a diamond between my lips, and my body wants its Percocet fix. My bones hurt. My actual bones. Like growing pains. Like how it was in detox, back in March. My bones remember and they want and they whisper, begging, Please, Hannah, please.