I pick my way back across the room. The photograph is glossy, though faded from the years. I unpin it from the board. The four of us stand beside the World’s Ugliest Moose. On the back of the photo, in my mom’s perfect scrawl, it reads San Diego Zoo, August 2002. I cup the edges, careful to avoid prints. Sadness binds my chest, observing the way our eyes nearly disappear into our heads; we were smiling so hard.

Think, Shayna. I only slept a few hours, and the sun will be up soon. I should go back to bed to rest, but I can’t. Not now. Not before I admit I did write myself a to-do list. That I’ve been grieving and that I blacked out for an hour or so. That my sister isn’t alive. Maybe the real shame here is how I’ve been leading myself on a wild goose chase all week, instead of accepting the truth.

I set to biting my nails again, a habit I kicked when we turned thirteen and Angela told everyone I ate hangnails. My teeth worry my index finger, twisting and chewing. I sit down at Angela’s desk and check my email. The essays Jean-Luc found in the Sorbonne archives sit in a pile against the wall. I pick one up and reread the first page.

Angela wrote about the plight of the Paris homeless during periods of extreme weather: triple-digit heat in the summer and fifteen below zero in the winter. There should be some significance here, some insight I can glean from the way my flighty sister settled down and married this research topic her first year in the doctoral program. She concluded that, if we only had better urban planning, we could provide protection for the homeless from the elements, especially the elderly homeless—public verandas to shelter people in known homeless enclaves, natural havens to exploit cooler temperatures, such as the Luxembourg Gardens and other geographic bowls within the city.

Divine. Research. Trying to figure out possible veiled meanings of each piece of her life leads me to switch hands after nibbling another nail down to the plate. Angela wanted more than anything for us to be one mind on the ethereal twin plane she mentioned in the early emails. She wanted to tap into it when needed, like a superpower she imagined when we were children that she never let go of.

Social welfare. Community. Brothels. Shelters. Heat waves. Death. My legs feel weak again, and I sit cross-legged on the floor amid other papers I think might matter. The brothel tour receipt is grouped with my Notre Dame crypt pamphlet; the drawings on each are poor comforts now. They could be useless, absentminded doodles rather than burning X MARKS THE SPOT signs pointing the way.

Key phrases pop out from my sister’s notes, her emails, an image of the Gate to Hell.