Dad’s parents died when he was young. He was raised by his aunt in Lebanon. She died when I was only four. I don’t know much about the rest of the family. Dad doesn’t talk about them much, and I’m worried that if I ask questions, I’ll only make him sad. Occasionally, he’ll say something about this cousin or that cousin, and I store the information. I keep hoping that if I collect enough facts, I’ll be able to complete the puzzle.

“I know,” Dad says, chewing through a mouthful of noodles. Dad might be an esteemed professor of molecular biology, but he still talks with his mouth full. “I was just seeing if she wanted to share anything.”

“It was okay,” I say, splitting an egg roll in half.

Dad wiggles his eyebrows. “Okay. The most descriptive word in the English language.”

I take another large sip of my Coke. “Do your first years use that word a lot?”

Dad laughs. “I haven’t heard it too much yet, and it’ll hopefully stay that way, inshallah.” Dad usually doesn’t teach first years—he actually hardly ever teaches undergraduates, but this semester he’s teaching a Bio 101 class because the university president asked him to. The president said it would be good publicity for the university, but all the broken glassware and lab reports filled with typos are driving Dad nuts.

“You need to be nicer on those kids,” Grams says, and she squeezes Dad’s arm affectionately. “Remember that once upon a time you were just starting out, too.”

Dad grumbles and stares down at his plate of noodles. Something crosses over his face and I wonder if he’s thinking about his time in college, which means he’s probably thinking about Mom.

“Does Mom know about Mabel?” I don’t realize I’ve actually asked that question aloud until I see Dad’s and Grams’s faces.

Gram balls up a napkin in her hand and Dad keeps staring at his noodles. The only other customer in the restaurant is a young guy with a baseball cap who is eating a big plate of food all by himself, so the whole room goes quiet enough that I can hear the clanking of dishes in the restaurant’s kitchen.

“Corrie, honey,” Grams says slowly, looking over at Dad.

Dad shakes his head a little. “The honest answer is I’m not sure, Cora. I didn’t hear from her. I would guess she’s aware if she follows the news.”

“It didn’t get a lot of news coverage.” This is something me and every other person in Chestnut is pretty bitter about. Not that I wanted reporters following me around for months, shoving a microphone in my face. It hurt, though, in a way I didn’t expect, that reporters swarmed our town the day it happened, but then left the day after when it was clear the body count wasn’t high enough to merit front-page coverage.

My sister was dead and that wasn’t even remarkable enough to be national news for longer than approximately five minutes.