She was a term late for Pacific, but she could catch up. Money was tight, but she could get a job, couldn’t she? Her father didn’t need her to make model airplanes and stare into the dark, after all. Dee breathed through the guilt that stabbed at her. The air was laden with mingled scents of hot glue and despair. She thought, This cannot be my life. This is a ghost life. Tears traced burning lines down her cheeks.

In the morning Dee made the special coffee to take to her father in bed. The special coffee was made with the fancy glass thing from San Francisco, and it took a long time to drip through. It was bitter and gritty like river sediment and her father loved it. Maybe he put all his love into the coffee maker because the bigger things were too painful. Dee hated the coffee maker because it reminded her of when they were all together. She poured the scalding water over the coffee grounds. The dark-brown scent filled the kitchen. This morning she was going to speak to him, she really was.

She pulled back her long sleeve and poured a little boiling water over her wrist, gasping. She watched the bracelet of red blisters rise on her flesh. That helped. She let the sleeve fall down to hide it, and finished putting everything on the tray. She would tell him today. He would be mad, he would be hurt. But she couldn’t keep it to herself any longer. Pretty pebble.

She went into her father’s room and put the tray on the table. She thought it would put him in a good mood, if the scent of coffee led him out of sleep. She opened the curtains to the white world. Houses, mailboxes, cars—the edges of everything were blunted with white snow. She turned to say, Look how much fell in the night! Then she saw him. His body lay very straight in bed, still in the blinding snowlight. His face wore an expression that for a moment she could not place. Then she recognized it as a welcome.

It was a stroke, they said. They didn’t say it was brought on by Lulu’s vanishing, and then Dee’s mother leaving. They didn’t need to. So the person who took Lulu also took Dee’s mother, and then her father. Dee was taken too. For how much of her remains, after everything? She feels like a big, dark, empty room.

There was no ballet school because there was no money to pay for it. She didn’t finish high school either. Dee got a job at the drugstore. But she had her real work, which was to look for the person who took her sister. All the men who had been at the lake that day, all the glances, the roll call of suspects. They are her job now.