I sat on the floor now with the wedding album in my lap and looked at the woman in ivory and thought about the things I had not questioned at twenty-three because I had been too broken to question anything. The closed casket. The speed of the funeral. My mother’s strange composure, a composure I had interpreted as stoicism and now wondered about differently. And one other thing, a thing I had buried so deeply I had nearly forgotten it: a phone call, two days after the accident, a number I didn’t recognize, a woman’s voice saying my name and then nothing — silence, then a click, as though she’d changed her mind.

I had thought it was a wrong number. I had not thought of it again for fourteen years.

I called Marcus. He answered on the second ring, his voice its usual warm tenor, and I said: I need you to come home.

He was there in thirty minutes, which told me something — that he had not gone far, that wherever he’d been he had left quickly. When he came through the door I was still sitting on the floor with the album. He looked at my face and something in his own face shifted, a settling, like a building absorbing a tremor.

“I know,” he said. Just that.

He sat down across from me. He told me everything, which took a long time, and during which I did not cry, because I had moved somewhere beyond crying into a country with no name.

He had met Clara three years before he met me. They had been together, briefly and intensely, and then she had disappeared — he had been told, by her, that she needed to vanish, that there were circumstances she couldn’t explain, that he needed to let her go. He had done what she asked. He had carried it. And then, at a mutual friend’s birthday, he had walked into a room and seen me.

“I thought I was losing my mind,” he said. “You were so like her. And completely different. You were you.”

He had fallen in love with me — genuinely, he said, and I still believe this, or I try to — but the question of what had happened to Clara had never fully left him. When he found her, two years ago, alive and living twenty minutes away under her own name, he had not told me, because he did not know how. He said it as though this were a reasonable explanation. Maybe it was. I don’t know yet.

What I know is this: my sister is alive. She lives on Maple Street in a white house with a yellow light in the window. She has my hair and my laugh and a scar near her left collarbone. She has been alive for fourteen years while I built my grief into a monument and walked around it every day.