Thanks so much for offering to pay for our flights back home! I texted from her phone to mine. It’s the most generous thing anyone has ever done for me.

You’re so welcome, Lily. Anything to make you and Ash happy.

I’ll admit to gagging a little when I wrote the reply, and again when I used my card to pay for a one-way flight from Maryland to Portland for both her and Ash, selecting dates a week out. Money well spent, in the end.

And then I implemented the final part of the vanishing act.

There’s a point between Newdale and Yarmouth, where the road goes over a wide, fast-flowing river, a notorious spot for accidents because it’s a long stretch followed by a sharp bend and a bridge. There’s been talk about improving it for years, and all the locals know to slow down. Except Lily wasn’t a local, and Ash wouldn’t have remembered the treacherous curve. It’s an easy place to push a car into the river without making the accident obvious. After all, I couldn’t have the authorities finding it too quickly, and once I’d smashed the window from the inside and cleaned up the glass, got the empty car in the water and watched it bob around before it slowly tipped forward and disappeared, I shivered with delight. I wasn’t sure where it might end up, but with the amount of rain coming down, it would take a long while to be found.

My plan had to be flawless, and the execution of it even better, and so, two days later, I alerted the authorities. I told them I hadn’t heard from Ash or Lily, insisting something must have happened to them. I cried and begged them to do something, anything, to find my brother and his girlfriend. I played the terrified stepsister so well I deserved all the fucking Oscars. When the police found out Ash had disappeared before, had lived under a fake name in Brookmount and that Lily was an ex-con, their interest in the alleged missing persons case all but disappeared.

I waited, crying on Barbara’s, Patrick’s and Fiona’s shoulders, and, finally, after almost ten weeks—longer than I thought—Ricky came to the house, his mood somber. They’d found Lily’s car more than a mile downstream from the bridge, completely submerged. There were no bodies, but Ash’s and Lily’s bags were in the trunk, her purse containing her wallet and phone still wedged under the seat. I cried when Ricky told me how the driver’s window had been broken in their apparent attempt to escape, sobbed when he reassured me they’d do everything possible to recover Ash and Lily, although I had to understand there was a possibility they’d been swept out to sea.