with only two tablets left, and a yellowed copy of The Old Man and the Sea with three pages dog-eared for reasons Gabe didn’t care to guess.
Then he stripped the bed.
The sheet came off first, then the blanket, then the mattress pad. He grabbed the edge of the mattress to lift it so he could pull the fitted sheet loose from underneath.
Something soft slid from between the mattress and box spring and landed against his wrist.
He froze.
At first, his mind refused to name what he was holding. It was only cloth. Old cloth. A small thing. White once, though now it had yellowed with age. A pair of women’s underwear, cotton, with faded little blue flowers along the waistband.
Gabe stared at it.
There was a stitched repair at the left hip. A crescent-shaped mend done with pale thread, neat but visible. He knew that stitch.
His fingers went cold.
He had not seen his sister Ellie’s face in fourteen years except in photographs. He had been four when she disappeared, too young to hold every detail but old enough to keep strange ones: the sound of her laugh, the smell of peach shampoo, the way she used to twirl him by the wrists in the backyard until they both fell in the grass dizzy and breathless. He remembered her teasing him with laundry on summer days, tugging clean clothes from the basket and
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