But the façade cracks when my eyes float over to Cora, sitting across from me, smashing her meatloaf into something unidentifiable with the tines of her fork as the candlelight illuminates the dark circles under her eyes. I push my own mushy meatloaf into my mashed potatoes, realizing I’m doing the exact same thing. I reach under the table to give Blizzard my dinner roll so it appears that I’m actually eating the meal that probably tastes delicious.

“… about the pregnancy.”

Mandy’s voice pushes through my fog, and I lift my head, turning towards her. Pregnancy? A silence washes over the dinner table, and I feel incredibly out of the loop. “What?” I glance from face to face, but everyone is looking down at their plates like they’re in the midst of a riveting crossword puzzle. My eyes shift back to Cora, but she’s not looking at her plate. Her eyes are wide and accusatory as she stares down a sheepish-looking Mandy.

Mandy presses her lips between her teeth, flipping her hair over one shoulder. “Sorry. I-I didn’t mean to blurt that out. We were talking about our cousin’s new baby, and it just triggered… you know. I suck at thinking before I speak.”

I blink. Cora’s fork clinks against the dinner plate as she folds her hands in her lap, but she refuses to meet my eyes. I don’t think she’s looked at me once since our stare-down from earlier. I run my tongue along the roof of my mouth, putting two and two together with a hard knot twisting in my gut. “Are you pregnant, Cora?”

Her head finally jerks towards me, alarmed by the sound of my voice addressing her for the first time in weeks. I watch her haunted eyes swirl with grief and confusion and sadness and everything in between. But the eye contact doesn’t last, and she ducks her head with fluttering lashes. “I was,” she says softly, so soft I almost don’t hear her. Then she pins her eyes back on Mandy. “I didn’t want to talk about this. I didn’t want to talk about any of this.”

Cora pushes back from the table and stands up, scratching at her wrist and making a quick escape from the dining room to the staircase.

I follow, not caring if it looks strange or inappropriate—my instincts tell me to follow her.

I can feel their eyes boring into my back, trying to understand why I’m chasing Mandy’s sister up the stairs, but they have to know.

They have to know we’re different now.

The image of Cora and me standing together, our hands interlocked, dappled in blood stains and dirt with an identical far-off look in our eyes, has made the rounds on the internet. In fact, it went viral as soon as the photo was released by the media. It has over two-million shares and hundreds of thousands of comments ranging from, “Sending prayers to those poor souls” to “This looks like the movie poster for the next Quentin Tarantino film” to “Following for future wedding announcement”. Mandy delicately questioned me about the photo, hoping for insight into our shared nightmare. Hoping for answers I wasn’t able to give her. She doesn’t know all the details of what transpired in that basement—only what she’s seen in news articles and TV broadcasts.