I take the Roswell Road exit, and as I ride up the off ramp, the King and Queen buildings rise above the tree line, just a couple of miles further down the interstate. The twin towers each have lattice crowns so the buildings resemble chess pieces: the Queen has a rounded arc, the King a squared-off top. Right now they are lit up with blue light, gleaming on the horizon. Last year I stood on this same bridge staring at the towers—they were green then—and working up the nerve to jump. Ethan found me and talked me off the bridge and into the hospital. He literally saved my life. Of course he did—that’s his job, bestowed on him by our father as he lay bleeding to death in our house: Watch your sister. His last words. Watch your screwed-up disaster of a sister.

I drive down Roswell Road, passing the ice-skating rink and the adult entertainment shop and the gas stations where day laborers stand every morning waiting for contractors who need to hire workers cheap. Past them are apartments and a New Age bookstore and the red bull’s-eye logo of Target, and at the top of the hill is the Church of Scientology and more apartment complexes and a Waffle House and a former strip joint-slash-gentlemen’s club that has weeds thrusting up through cracks in the parking lot. And leading off of both sides of Roswell are side streets like tributary streams leading to residential neighborhoods, row upon row of houses, thousands of them rolling away into the night, only a few sputtering streetlights to hold off the darkness.

I turn onto Ethan’s street, the motorcycle’s throttled growl echoing in my wake. Across from Ethan’s house, the construction site is dark and quiet. I give it the finger before going up Ethan’s driveway, bouncing over the tree roots. The front windows of Ethan’s house are soft yellow squares of lamplight in the dark. I’m home.

The kitchen door is open and I walk inside. “Ethan?” I call out. I grab a beer from the fridge. “You will not believe the evening I’ve had.” I push the fridge door shut with my foot and pop the top off my bottle, draining half of it before I walk into the den.

I stop. Ethan has two chairs in his den, one on either side of his couch. Right now Ethan is sitting in the straight-backed chair that is really the fourth chair of the kitchen table set. He normally sits in the other, upholstered chair across the room, but now another man is sitting there. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and pants and has ink-black hair with some silver at the temples framing a strong, craggy face.

“You must be Jimmy’s daughter,” the man in the upholstered chair says to me.