Wandering through the short hallway, past the galley kitchen, I stopped in front of the bathroom door. It was closed, and the cold metal of the knob made my hand freeze. I didn’t want to see the room where my sister had died. Nothing would get me to open that door. Letting go, I backed slowly into the bedroom. Here was a hint of the familiar shambles, at least. There were no overflowing ashtrays or used cotton balls, but an open suitcase on the bed was stuffed with clothing that was piled too high for the bag ever to close. A black dress flopped drunkenly over a chair, a pair of black pumps in the gutter beneath. The label on the dress caught my eye. Prada. Claudia, shopping at Prada? Not likely. Shoplifting at Prada was a possibility.

The clothes on the bed bore similar labels. Feeling slightly emboldened, I reached for the closet door. Inside, stacked like bricks in a crumbling wall, sat dozens of shoeboxes. Manolo Blahnik. Christian Louboutin. Jimmy Choo. How did anyone, even Claudia, steal that many shoes? I peeked inside a box and found a pair of black patent stilettos. The smooth red leather sole was virgin. Size nine? My sister and I were the same height, five foot six, and we wore a size seven shoe. She had stolen enough clothes from me over the years that I knew we were the same size, though when Claudia’s heroin addiction spiraled out of control, as it always did before each stint in rehab, she vanished into the skeletal range. Had my sister been involved in some scam to fence designer shoes? I pulled down a couple of hangers from the densely packed clothing rack. Gucci. Michael Kors. More Prada. Everything would have fit Claudia, assuming she wasn’t subsisting just on junk and tar.

I almost missed the brown cardboard box on the floor. The handwriting on it was flowing and feminine, and I wondered who was sending parcels to my little sister. I tore into the box before I realized it was from me. Before Christmas, I’d phoned in an order for an expensive, impossible-to-find perfume called Tabac Blond that my sister loved. The store had couriered over the box and Claudia had abandoned it in the closet, unopened. An odd sense of rejection made a lump in my throat and I shut the closet door.