When I saw her laptop on the kitchen table, I decided to run a quick search of my own and lifted the lid, squinting at the bright light. When the password prompt appeared, I closed it again. I wouldn’t have been able to guess my own security settings, let alone take a stab at my sister’s. As I leaned back in my chair, I thought about her theory of me being on holiday alone, decided it was plausible, even if it meant nobody would be searching for me yet.

“Are you ready?” Maya said as she came downstairs, and when she pulled the car keys from her pocket, a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. As she moved ahead of me I picked it up, turned it over and saw it was a receipt from a pharmacy for a bottle of Benadryl.

“Do you have hay fever?” I said, unsure how I knew that’s what the medicine was for, but grateful for the random fact leaping from the depths of my brain nonetheless.

“It’s been awful this year,” she said as she opened the door, before spinning around and almost bumping into me, her face filled with excitement. “Oh, my God, you remember?”

“Uh, yeah.” I nodded and made all the right noises as she beamed, saying she couldn’t believe it. She’d had terrible hay fever ever since she was a teen, and practically guzzled Benadryl by the gallon to get some relief. I didn’t want to let on I’d had no idea, or see her expression change to disappointment, and so I crushed the pharmacy receipt up into a ball, and a while later threw it in the trash.

Sweat pooled under my arms as we drove to Dr. Adler’s, my head twisting left and right as I tried to get a good look around. Maya pointed out Keenan’s house, which had a rusty swing-set in the front garden, the broken yellow plastic seats gently moving in the wind. After that we continued in silence for a while. I soon noticed our house was at the end of a long road flanked only by a few other dwellings, and all of them were spaced at least a quarter of a mile apart.

“Do you know why Dad chose the house?” I said. “It’s so remote.”

“It was your grandfather’s,” Maya said. “He left it to Brad when he died. Your pops was American, got your English grandmother pregnant when he was working over there, married her but couldn’t stick it, apparently. He came back here a year after Brad was born, basically abandoned his wife and your dad in the UK. They never had much of a relationship after that, and I think you only met your grandfather once, when you were small. Brad always said he got the house out of guilt.”