My fears of Angela’s outbursts—for what they were doing to our family, and to her own relationships after she broke up with her boyfriend, then keyed his car—were making me jittery. It got to the point where I would receive a call from her and a cramp would form in my stomach, anticipating conflict I couldn’t reason with, that refused to be fair. I didn’t want to feel that way about my sister when I was there for her. I would always be there for her. Our parents loved her, too, just not always in the way she wanted.

Somehow, after they died, Angela’s tirades, originally aimed at our family, her friends, and her boyfriends, landed squarely on me. A fact that royally pissed me off, in the midst of grieving, graduating college, and being tasked with managing my parents’ testaments. Although we received equal halves of their estate, and that might be enough for other siblings, she never forgave my not selling the family home. As the executor, I didn’t want to, so I didn’t. About a month after the funeral (and several nasty exchanges by email and phone), we stopped talking. Just quit altogether. I was never entirely sure of Angela’s reasons, but I couldn’t take it anymore, the guilt she insisted I should feel regarding our parents’ favoritism—knowing the crushing guilt I felt was far worse.

Posters of American metal bands and images of women in animal-print lingerie posed in various attack stances line the walls of the bar—far cries from the beasts Angela and I first encountered at the zoo. A furry claw curls under my bartender’s jawline, an arm tattooed down to the collar of his white tank top. The fur color matches his surprised eyes—red, like he just smoked a bowl or contracted pink eye. He looks me up and down, then points past a pair of men at the counter—drunken regulars, from their looks of quiet stupor.

I double-check the address on the receipt I found in the folder as I head to the shadow-filled courtyard behind the building; we’re near the Pantheon, a secular mausoleum—shudder—on the Left Bank, and it’s still eerily quiet before the night gets underway in the Latin Quarter. It’s not that I expected a historical brothel tour to be rainbows and daisies. But an official sign would have been nice, or a pamphlet describing the tour itself; instead, broken glass lines the doorway of this bar like a crunchy get lost mat.

The tour guide grimaces when I emerge into the brick enclosure, then takes a beat to stare at my chest.

“Bon soir.” I try to make eye contact with the other civilians, three young men, if you can call them that—maybe late teens—but they’re all absorbed in the cracked cobblestone at our feet. Cigarette butts layer the ground.