A week after the accident, when it had become clear that Hallie wasn’t coming home, her mother had gone on a six-hour cleaning spree. She’d dusted every corner of Hallie’s side. She dragged the dust bunnies out from under the bed and then vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed the carpet. An hour later, Maren found her sitting on the floor, crying with the machine still running.

Every so often, Maren would rumple Hallie’s blankets, toss her pillows around, pile up books on the bedside table, and lie there pretending her sister had only just gotten up for a glass of water. She made sure to tidy it all up again in the morning before her mother came in.

Now she sprawled on her own messy bed, pulled out her phone, and scrolled through her photos, going back in time. She lingered on her favorites. Hallie’s grinning face beside hers with a rainbow arcing overhead. A lopsided cake with marshmallow eyes and an ice cream cone poking out of its forehead that was supposed to be a unicorn but looked more like an alien.

Maren kept scrolling, traveling back in time to when she and Amos were still friends. The photos made her stomach ache: The two of them at a baseball game in the city, pointing at each other with giant foam fingers. Amos with Henri perched on his shoulder with a wet parrot dropping sliding down the sleeve of his shirt (he’d chosen to take French at school and loved trading insults with the bird). Maren and Amos on Halloween, dressed up as zombie bananas, laughing so hard that Maren had cried off half her makeup.

She turned off her phone and plugged it into the charger. A tiny brown moth fluttered around the overhead light, so she switched it off and lay there staring at the glowing star stickers she and Hallie had arranged in their own versions of constellations. The Great Horned Owl, Snorticus the Warrior, The Two Sisters. She missed her old life so much, it felt like she was turning inside out. Soon Hallie would be at one of those facilities where people went when the hospital couldn’t help them anymore. Where there was no hope of her going back to normal, of her coming home, of their family’s life ever being the same again.

Maren prayed with every cell in her body for her dream cure to work.

Six

The dream was always the same, a nearly perfect copy of the memory that flooded Maren’s sleeping brain every single night.