“I don’t think so, Rose. You’re more like me than you care to admit. We’re sisters, after all. Raised in the same environment together. Same stimuli.”

I swallow, then ask the question I’m not sure I want an answer to.

“Did he touch you? When we were kids, did he touch you?”

Her face is stone cold, and I notice for the first time it’s stopped snowing. For a moment, everything is still and silent, a funeral home at midnight.

“We grew up in the same house,” she says. “You tell me.”

“I…I never saw.” I try to think of my childhood, of any time I felt there might have been something off at home. Amiss. “He never did anything to me,” I tell her.

“So why would you think that about me?”

“Because I’m trying to understand what it was that made you…” I glance down at the knife in her hand, the tip pointing to the ground. “What you are.”

She leans in and I can smell her. Smelling like adolescence.

“A dog is just a dog,” she whispers. “No one asks why it tears the rabbit apart.”

With that, she turns and starts walking away, down the parking lot and toward a trail covered in a thin layer of snow. After she disappears into the night, a glow emanates and I realize it’s the flashlight on her phone. She navigates the trail into the distance, disappearing into the trees, her light distant and intermittent. Firefly.

I head back to my car, where inside I find an ounce of warmth. I leave my sister to the dark, absorbed by the cold, the wet. Leave her to this place of bones.

Perhaps it’s the one place she finds peace.

Forty-Three

Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin

November 12

Colin drove home later than usual, already two hours past sunset. He navigated the streets of Whitefish Bay, guessing he had two minutes left before he was in his house. Three until he was on his couch, beer in hand, fire turned on. It was his night to cook, but he wanted to sit for a little while. Fifteen, twenty minutes. Sit and do nothing. Allow his brain to slow down.

But he wasn’t home yet, so on the drive from downtown, he’d allowed himself a few thoughts about Rose Yates. He considered her the way someone would a brain teaser they couldn’t solve. A little bit every day, hoping the answer would suddenly reveal itself. He had no solution for Rose Yates. He had theories but no answer, and theories didn’t do him a lot of good.

On the drive, he also pondered the Yates family in totality, which led to him thinking about family in general. How there are some good families in the world, some bad ones, but mostly all those in between, the mixtures, the good kids and the black sheep. Which one was Rose? he wondered. Did the Yates family all share the same characteristics, or was there something about Rose that deviated from the others?