If nothing had changed, the days that I was back at Mansfield with my siblings could have been extremely uncomfortable for me. Everywhere we went, everything I showed them was cast under a cloud of judgment after our trip to Nola's old attic. If we went to my room in Mansfield, the change was too little, too late to please them. If I took them down to the kitchen, they were displeased with how impeccable everything was, how there was no room for mess. If I took them outside to show them the park and the ponds and the trails I'd run down when I was a child, they saw them only as my means of escaping the combined households, and didn't seem to notice how much the grounds looked like something out of a fairy book, or how much I genuinely loved being out under the trees. Before I'd turned eighteen, I hadn't even thought to question my existence in any real way. I'd been perfectly content to run wild under the greater canopy of the maple trees for as long as I possibly could, and no one had ever stopped me.

I realize that Susie and Billy were more concerned for my wellbeing than the more romantic, scenic parts of my wayward existence. I'd been under those trees and not in school. I'd been swimming in the pond instead of sitting down to dinner with family. I'd been a silent observer of all kinds of natural phenomenon, never able to ask any of the questions I might have had. Thinking back, I can't remember any specific things I'd wondered about when I was smaller, but I knew there must have been some. An entire childhood full of questions I had never asked was lost to me now, and as much imagination as I'd ever had, I would never get that time back. Billy and Susie were right.

But still, a part of me was surprised by the strength of Billy's grief and Susie's anger. My life had been difficult, true, but I had never thought of it in terms of the huge, sweeping tragedy that my siblings seemed determined to convince me it was. Up until four years ago, I'd thought my life was normal, or at least as normal as it was ever going to get for someone like me. I didn't want to think of ten full years as a tragic betrayal. I'd never been attracted to that kind of drama. Drama found us anyway.

We were visiting Tom in the hospital. Ned had been his primary visitor, what with Dr Bertram looking after his wife's wellbeing—limiting her dosage to reasonable amounts, Ned told me—and he had taken a leave of absence from seminary to be able to spend hours a day with his brother, who fought himself to consciousness at least four times a day now, for about half an hour each. Ned had waited until the third day to bring us along with him, and he seemed oddly nervous as he led us into the hospital wing, running his fingers along the rolled cuff of his opposite sleeve.

"He probably won't wake up, you know," he threw over his shoulder as we kept up the pace behind him. "He doesn't normally wake up between noon and four. I think the light hurts his eyes too much for him to really try."

Tom's handsome face looked less ghastly now, and he seemed to have gained a little weight from whatever nutrition they were able to give him. Susie and I, who had seen Tom like this before, were less fazed, but Billy stood awkwardly in the corner of the room, arms folded across his chest, pacing every now and again. The sight of Thomas Bertram, total stranger, on a hospital bed seemed to disturb Billy, but he wouldn't meet my eyes. Susie looked at me, but I shrugged and shook my head. Whatever was bothering Billy, it was nothing I understood yet.

Visiting someone in the hospital is a strange experience if they're not awake to see you. Ned usually sat with his brother for a few hours at a time, reading to him or writing in his book or watching TV. With the room packed to capacity, it was difficult to find an activity that didn't signal intense boredom, especially since we were all terribly aware of how bored we were, and how rude it would be to show it.

To pass the time, I focused on watching the rise and fall of Tom's chest signal his breathing. He had always been so much bigger than me, barrel-chested like his father at age seventeen. The two Thomas Bertrams, older and younger, resembled each other so much that they were sometimes mistaken for each other from the back, though Dr Bertram's greying hair now gave him away more often than not. Nola had told Billy that he looked just like our father, and Billy had barely reined in his fury. Was that what it was like, when sons looked like their fathers? Was it scary, to look in the mirror and see the previous generation looking at you? Susie and I looked like our father, too—there was nothing of our mother in any of us—but maybe it was different for us, the softness of the jawlines, the lines of the face. I saw the resemblance between my father and the two of us, but I couldn't confuse us on a bad day. Tom Bertram could have been Thomas Bertram, Billy Price could have been Will Price. Two sons named after their fathers, two fathers with their sons' faces. I didn't understand it.

Ned, shorter than his brother, more willowy of build, with his mother's eyes, sat just at the foot of Tom's bed, leaning forward with his elbows on the mattress, both hands holding a book, but his eyes were on his brother, too, watching him breathe, listening to the sound of the machine that measured his heartbeats. The barrel chest was diminished through the trauma and the malnutrition. Would Tom's voice sound different, when he woke up, now that it was coming from a smaller instrument? I tried to imagine that, only to discover that I didn't want to. I blinked rapidly, and looked away.

When Ned's phone buzzed, he ignored it. It buzzed again shortly afterward, and sighing, he reached into his pocket to turn it off, but something on the screen made him stop. He put down his book and sat up straight, then turned around to look at all of us.

"Something's going on."

"What are you taking about?" Billy's voice sprang from the corner, and while he looked concerned, he also seemed relieved of the distraction.

"Something's…I don't know, I just got…I think we need to go back to Mansfield."

Susie, Billy, and I exchanged a look, and as one decided not to ask any more questions. On the way out the door, I stopped to press a quick kiss on Tom's forehead, then hustled to join the rest of the group as they sped their way down the hospital corridor.

I sat in the front seat of the car, with Ned behind the wheel and Billy and Susie in the back, on some silent agreement we all had. Further still, not one of us asked Ned what was going on. After making it onto the highway, Ned dug his phone out of his pocket and handed it to me. Looking down, I saw that there were three new messages, one from Dr Bertram, and two from Mary.

Dr Bertram's said: Come home now.

Mary's said: I'm coming to you. Don't believe everything you hear.

With a nod from Ned, I handed the phone to Billy and Susie, who both looked bewildered. Susie opened her mouth to say something, but Billy nudged her quiet. As for me, there was a sinking feeling in my chest accompanied by a creeping feeling up my spine, as if something were behind me in the dark. Whatever was happening, it involved the Bertrams and the Crawfords, and while I couldn't guess what it was, it felt like there was a tickling sensation on my memory, as if I could know very easily if only I wanted to.

We got home in record time, and Ned was out of the car before I could unfasten my seatbelt. The three if us looked at each other over the car roof, eyeing first the house, then the new silver Porsche out front, then each other.

"Should we go in?" Susie asked, echoing my uncertainty. "Are we, like, allowed to?"

"He showed us the message," Billy's voice was more confident than his words. "He wouldn't have done that if he didn't want us involved."

"Flan?" Both my siblings were looking at me now, and it occurred to me that I was the authority figure on both Ned and Bertram family politics, and that it was a strange feeling to be the authority on anything.

I wavered for a moment, weighing options. If I was going to go in to find out what was wrong, I wanted my siblings with me. Being with the Bertrams without Billy and Susie made me feel naked and exposed. But that was for me, and for my own comfort, not for the people inside. Something was happening and of the three of us, I was the only one who was a member of this family.

So I sighed, and shook my head, and said, "I'll go in. You should go back to your rooms or hang out outside, and I'll find you and let you know what's going on."

Billy nodded, coming around the car to guide Susie toward the forest path, but Susie hung back, uncertain. "Are you sure? You don't want us in there?"

I smiled, desperately wishing I could bring her with me. "It'll be good, Sus. I'll see you soon." I turned and walked toward the house, looking back once to see Billy coaxing Susie away from the car, and my sister's eyes fixed, worried and forlorn, on me.

I was expecting noise or chaos when I came to the sitting room, but what greeted me was total silence. Rather than standing at his favorite spot against the windows, Dr Bertram was sitting in a chair, his back straight against the cushion, his hands perfectly situated on the armrests as if they had been tied down. He stared ahead of him, clearly lost in thought.

Mrs Bertram was swaddled in a big blanket, but she was standing, much to my surprise, and gazing up at the fifth shelf of one of the bookcases built into the walls. Just above her head was a photo that had been there for as long as I could remember, a picture of her four beautiful children, all together, surrounded by presents, smiling happily at the camera. Ned looked to be around eight, putting it four years before my arrival. Mrs Bertram was stock still, not even wavering on her feet. Something about it made me look away.

Mary was there, too, and she at least had looked up when I entered, offering me a smile so warm I almost forgot about the way she'd spoken to me on the phone on my birthday. She was sitting next to Ned, whose elbows were on her knees, his head down, staring at the floor, and her hand was on his back, rubbing it comfortingly every so often.

Nola, I knew, was behind me. I didn't look her way, but I could feel her there, almost as if I could feel her breathing. I hoped she had no knitting needles handy, though that was a silly thought; she had never attacked me.

It was Mary who, seeing me and my confusion, spoke. Her tone was soft, almost like the one we'd used in Tom's hospital wing earlier, and a jerk of her head invited me to move closer so I could hear. I moved with trepidation, careful of how close I got to her.

"Mireille's gone missing."

"What?" I looked around at the rest of the people in the room, but no one moved. No one, it seemed, had even heard us speaking.

"Rush hasn't seen her in three weeks, but they only realized she was missing missing last night when he got back to their penthouse to find her gone, along with some of her things."

I gaped at her, then at Ned. I had a fluent vocabulary for disaster, but this was not in my repertoire.

"Did they call the police?"

"Oh, yes, everything's being done," Mary sounded chipper and confident, in direct contrast to the rest of the people in the room, "and anyway I don't think for one second she's in any danger."

"What makes you say that?"

Mary rolled her eyes conspiratorially, breathing out a sigh of exasperation, "Because Henry's gone, too, the idiot."

It took me a moment to digest the information, and when I had, it seemed absurd. Mireille and Henry? They hadn't seen each other in years, surely. Unless Henry made it a habit to seek out married women he'd once slept with.

But then, given what I knew about Henry, that might be something he would do.

"Have you heard from him?" She seemed so calm and collected. Under the same circumstances, I was sure that I would not have been as cool.

She shrugged, glancing for the first time at Ned and Dr Bertram, "No, but this isn't the first time…I mean, he's done things like this before, and he's always fine."

So Mireille had left her husband to…what? Run away with Henry and have his babies? Run away with Henry and never come back? We had all known that Rush was an idiot—even Nola had known it from the start, and she'd set them up.

And Henry. Henry who had protested his undying love for me, who had sought me out years after first telling me he loved me. There was a large part of me, most of me, that felt a surge of relief that he had moved on, even if it was by seducing a married woman. He had almost convinced me that he really did love me, and only me. And now he was gone, and Mireille was gone, too.

"But you know they're fine? Do we know they're fine?" Maybe my voice was too loud. Mary sent me a surprised look.

"No need to overreact, Fawn. They'll be fine, things will be fine. And honestly, pretty soon, they'll probably be exactly the way they were before, so there's really no need for everyone to get worked up."

Ned took his head out of his hands and looked at her as if trying to work through a puzzle, but I knew Henry and so I knew what she meant.

"You don't think he'll stay with her. You think she'll end up back with her husband."

"Sad as I am to say it, my brother has never been a really faithful person. Except with you, Fawn, I mean he was crazy about you, but he's not really…I mean, that's not who he is. Pretty soon I think the thrill of being with a married woman will wear off as it always does and then, well, it'll be business as usual. I'm sorry to say."

There was nothing I could say to that. In place of actual words, I walked to the couch Mrs Bertram had occupied for as long as I could remember and perched on its seat. Mary turned her apologetic face away from me, letting me process. Henry and Mireille. Mireille and Henry were together, and gone, and no one had heard from them.

"This may seem like a stupid question," I murmured finally, looking at Dr Bertram's face, all carved out of stone, "but if Mireille's missing, shouldn't we look for her?"

"That's not necess—" Mary began, but Dr Bertram shot out of his seat, strode to the door and flung it open, disappearing down the hallway, the rug swallowing his footsteps. In the stunned silence, Mrs Bertram followed him silently, shutting the door carefully behind her.

"The police are looking, Fawn. There's no need to get them all upset." Mary's tone was gentle, like it had always been with me when I couldn't speak, like she was afraid I might bolt.

"Flannery."

"Yes," she smiled and rolled her eyes sheepishly, shrugging her shoulders. "I'm trying. Old habits die hard."

"This is your fault," came a voice from behind me, and Ned brought his head up as I stiffened. Nola had stood up, clutching her knitting, and come around to stand by the arm of my sofa. Suddenly, I was a rat backed into a corner.

"Come again?" Ned's tone was barely civil.

"If you had accepted Henry, he would never have done this to us. Mireille would still be with her husband, and we would know she was safe." Her voice shook with a feeling I had never heard before. I had always known Mireille was Nola's favorite, but I had never given her credit for love, never believed that she was capable of love. Now, if she cried, there would have been tears running down her face, and my heart began to beat as if it were trying to break out of my ribcage.

"Nola—" Ned was on his feet.

"If you had just done what you should have done and dated him, he would be happy with you and he would never have taken—he would never have told her—we would know where—this is your fault." Her voice became a hiss, and she caught her breath in a sob.

"You never thought I had the right to talk to him," I reminded her quietly. "You cut up my dress for inviting him into the house when he invited himself. I never wanted him."

"You—" she took a step toward me, and I would never have been able to move away from her in time, but Ned was between us, rage stiffening his spine.

"Leave. Now."

Ten seconds later, she was gone, and Ned and Mary and I were alone together in the room, and none of us could look at each other.

"They'll find her," I said to no one in particular.

"If she wants to be found," Ned muttered.

"We all knew Rush wasn't exactly endgame," came Mary's voice. "She had to have been dying of boredom."

"Did she say anything to you?" I turned my eyes as close to Ned's face as I could bear.

"No. She and I…well, we don't really, I mean…We don't speak unless we're in the same room. None of us really do."

The room ticked around us. I tried to imagine that life, one in which I didn't want to talk to my siblings unless we were forced. I tried to imagine a life in which my brother disappeared and I wasn't worried. I looked down at my lap, at my hands clasped there. I didn't love Mireille, I never had, but I had never wanted her to disappear. I had never loved Henry, but I had hoped he was better than this.

When I looked up, I saw Ned had sat back down, a full arm's length away from Mary. I stood up, smoothing down my shorts and mumbling something about getting some air before hurrying out the door to find my siblings and to make sure, doubly sure, triply sure, that they were there and healthy and in one piece and that, most of all, that they cared enough to tell me where they were going before they disappeared.