“How did you get in here?” I asked, breathless. “The door has been locked for years.”
“Grey’s gone, Iris,” she said without looking up at me.
Lightning flashed outside. Thunder followed a moment later, stuttering through the house and making the window glass jitter. My hair was wet and my teeth were chattering from the cold. Cate told me that the three of us were all born in the middle of storms. Grey was lightning, Vivi was thunder, and I was the sea in a tempest. Grey had always hated storms, but Vivi loved them. When a second curl of thunder crawled in through the open window, I wondered if she’d somehow summoned it.
“What do you mean, Grey’s gone?” I asked.
“I talked to her agent, her manager, her publicist, the photographer she was supposed to shoot with yesterday. I talked to her friends in Paris and London. I talked to her doorman. No one has seen or heard from her in days.” Vivi held up the latest Vogue, the one I’d hidden under my pillow to save it from my mother. “Have you read this?”
“A couple of paragraphs, but—”
“Read some more.”
“There are more important—”
“Seriously, read it.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Oh, you’ll know it when you see it.”
I opened the magazine and picked up where I left off.
New Year’s Day marked the ten-year anniversary of one of the world’s most enduring modern mysteries: the disappearance of the Hollow sisters. On a quiet street in Edinburgh, three little girls vanished right out from under their parents’ watchful gaze. Then, exactly one month later, they came back, to the very same street they were taken from. They were naked and carried nothing with them but an antique folding hunting knife. They had no serious injuries nor signs of sexual assault. They weren’t dehydrated or malnourished. All three of them bore a fine half-moon incision at the base of their throats, nestled in the crook of their collarbones, that had been stitched closed with silk thread. The wounds were healing nicely.
No one has been able to say where they went or what happened to them—not even Grey Hollow, the eldest of the three. She was eleven at the time, certainly old enough to remember snippets of her experience, though she refused to give a statement to Scottish police and has never spoken publicly about her suspected kidnapping.
Conspiracy theories abound, the most popular of which are alien abduction, parental hoax, and (perhaps because of the Celtic setting) fairy changelings.
There were several large out-of-court settlements from news organizations that had falsely accused the girls’ parents of being involved in their disappearance. The funds went toward enrolling the three sisters in Highgate School for Girls, a lavishly expensive day school that counts famous actors, poets, and journalists among its alumni. One of the Old Girls recently married into an extended branch of the royal family. The grounds are green and expansive, the main building a timber-framed Tudor mansion with wisteria growing thick on the facade. Grey Hollow struggled to thrive there.
A series of family tragedies followed in the ensuing years, the most devastating of which was a Capgras delusion—Hollow’s father, Gabe, reportedly believed his children had all been replaced by identical impostors. After two years in and out of psychiatric institutions, he killed himself when Grey was thirteen.
Little more is known about her teenage years, but at seventeen, she had a falling-out with her mother and found herself homeless. She dropped out of high school, moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Hackney with three other girls, and tried her hand at modeling. Within six months of leaving home, she’d walked for Elie Saab, Balmain, Rodarte, and Valentino. Within two years, she was the highest-earning supermodel in the world. Now, at the age of twenty-one, Hollow is the owner of and head designer at House of Hollow, whose creations have become some of the most sought-after in the industry after the label’s launch at Paris Fashion Week just under eighteen months ago.
One of the first things I tell her is that stitching bits of paper into her creations reminds me of another infamous unsolved crime: the mystery of the Somerton man. In 1948, an unidentified man was found dead on a beach in Australia. All the labels had been cut from his clothing, and police later found a tiny scroll of rolled-up paper sewn into his pants pocket. It read “Tamám Shud,” which means “finished” in Persian. The words had been torn from the final page of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
“That’s where I got the initial inspiration from,” Hollow says eagerly as she wraps her long fingers—preternaturally dexterous, like she’s a seamstress who’s been working for a hundred years—around a cup of unsweetened Ceylon tea. Her voice is surprisingly deep, and she rarely blinks. With white-blond hair, black eyes, and a smattering of freckles across her nose year-round, she is the definition of ethereal. I have interviewed many beautiful women, but none so truly otherworldly. “As a child I was obsessed with mysteries—probably because I was one.”
I’m under strict instructions from her publicist not to ask her about the missing month, but since she was the one who brought it up, I press my luck.
Does she really not remember anything?
“Of course I remember,” she says, her ink-drop gaze holding mine. Her smile is slight, sly; the same mischievous pixie grin that has made her famous. “I remember everything. You just wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
The article continued, but I came to a snap stop at that line, the line that Vivi had no doubt been talking about: Of course I remember. I remember everything.
You just wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
The words sank into me like acid, dissolving my flesh. I snapped the Vogue shut and sat on Grey’s bare bed, my hand pressed over my mouth.
“Yeah,” Vivi said heavily.
“That cannot be true.”
When I was seven years old, I vanished without a trace for a whole month.
On the very rare occasion she drank enough wine to talk about it, my mother emphasized the impossibility of it. How we were walking through the warren of lanes of Edinburgh’s Old Town, back to our father’s parents’ house. How we were there one moment, then gone the next. How she took her eyes off us for a second or two, long enough to peck our father on the cheek when the New Year’s fireworks began. How she heard nothing, saw no one—simply looked up to find the street before her empty. A lace-fine snow was falling through the air, the kind that melts when it hits the sidewalk. The alleyway was lit by oily slicks of light and pops of effervescence from the overhead starbursts.
Where there should have been three children, there were none.
Cate smiled at first; she thought we were playing with her. “Iris, Vivi, Grey, come out, come out, wherever you are,” she sang. We were bad at hide-and-seek, but she always pretended to take forever to find us. No giggles answered her this time. No whispers. Immediately, she knew something was wrong. In her first statement to the police, Cate would say that the air tasted burnt and smelled of wild, wet animal. That the only thing out of place on the street was a handful of fall leaves and white flowers on the stoop of a house that had burned down the month before. That was the first place she looked for us. All that had survived the flames of the fire was a freestanding doorframe, held up by nothing. My mother stepped through it and called our names and wandered from room to room in the shell of burnt-out bricks and rubble, her panic rising.