“Apparently.”

“Shannon’s file?”

“Right, right.” Still dazed, she went to the sideboard and opened the front doors to where she’d stored her sister’s file and a large bankers box. She brought it all to the table and set it out.

He went for the folder she’d cobbled together from the copies of her sister’s police file and news articles she’d gotten through the library. The detective she’d spoken to had even sent her copies of photographs of her sister.

Jeremy ignored the police reports but arrayed the photographs in front of him on the table.

“I wish I looked like her.” Emilie leaned over his shoulder. “We have the same mother, but she got the cool nose.”

She pointed at a photograph of Shannon Yates and another girl holding small trophies while standing before a red curtain.

“Seventh-grade honor roll,” she said. “She’d made straight As on every report card. They gave her a trophy. I never got straight As. Mom didn’t care about grades.”

“You do look a little like her,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much until—” Whatever he was going to say, he stopped before he said it.

“What’s she like? Can you tell me that?”

“If I start talking about your sister, I’ll never stop.” He put the photograph down and picked up another one—her sister dressed for a school play. She was some sort of autumn queen in a red gown and a crown of antlers. “So you’re her sister.”

“Baby sister, I guess. I had gotten so used to thinking of her as my baby sister. Forever thirteen? But she’s ten years older than I am. If she’s alive, I mean. She’d be thirty-three.”

Emilie took the lid off the bankers box. “The detective put me in touch with a school friend of my sister’s. She’d kept a bunch of Shannon’s old things. You know, hoping she’d come back someday. When I told her I was her sister, she sent me everything she had.”

Jeremy began removing items from the box. He was careful with them and respectful, but she noticed his hands were shaking.

“Jeremy?”

“I’m fine,” he said.

She doubted that but didn’t argue as he laid out all her sister’s things on the table. The box contained all the stuff in it you’d expect from a dreamy thirteen-year-old girl. Fantasy novels—The Last Unicorn, The Hobbit, Dragonsbane, The Clockwork Raven. A plastic toy horse, black with gray and white painted spots, and a flowing mane. A single polished moonstone in a velvet bag, something she might have bought in a museum gift shop. Old VHS tapes with garage sale stickers on them—The Princess Bride. Matilda. Mulan. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The NeverEnding Story…

Fritz crawled out of her hood, down her arm, and trotted over to the piles of books and things. He tried to climb onto the horse toy but only managed to knock it over.

“Kind of breaks your heart a little,” Emilie said as she gently stroked Fritz. “Her sad little treasure chest. A rock. A toy. Some old fifty-cent VHS tapes from garage sales. Library discards falling apart.”

She ran her fingers over the ratty spines of her sister’s Chronicles of Narnia books held together with old rubber bands. She knew it was a seven-book series, but Emilie counted only six. A notecard tucked inside one book read, Discard, missing book. Her sister had gotten the series for free because one book got lost. Meanwhile, Emilie had owned the entire series in beautiful hardcovers, and she never even read them. Her mother had eventually given them away to a neighbor’s son.

“One’s missing.”

Jeremy gave the books a quick, almost cursory glance and said, “The Silver Chair.”

She laughed. “You know them all?”

“C. S. Lewis wrote those books in Oxford. I was born in Oxford. My parents met while students at Oxford. I lived in Oxford. I went to Oxford. So yeah, I know them all,” he said as if annoyed that she even questioned his deep ancestral knowledge of Narnia. “What’s this?”

He opened a folded sheet of poster board covered with pictures Shannon had cut out of magazines. A page of fairies and elves. A page of tigers and wildcats. Doors without walls, freestanding in strange deserts. Giants. Goblins. Queens and princesses and knights and archers and girls with swords. Valkyries. Lost boys. Smoke-colored foxes. Dragon boats on rainbow rivers.

On the top of the page, it read in a girl’s looping print, WHERE I WILL BE IN TEN YEARS.

“Guidance counselor project, I think. He wrote on the back that she was supposed to do a collage of what she wanted to be doing for a job in ten years,” Emilie said. “Not make up a fairy world to live in. He gave her a B− for not understanding the assignment. Jerk.”

It appeared she’d tried to do it the “right” way and had quickly given up on that. In the bottom corner of the page was a pencil drawing of a teeny tiny girl sitting at a desk. Wouldn’t anyone rather be a queen than have a desk job?

“She understood the assignment,” Jeremy said, more to himself than her. He ran his fingers across the magazine pictures—the strange mossy forests, the fairy circles, the mythic animals—almost tenderly, like they were family photos and not some kid’s old homework.

“Check this out.” Emilie pulled out a sheet of paper. “She did get an A on this one in English class.” The Nobody Queen By Shannon K. Yates

Once upon a time, in a world unseen.

A nobody girl became the queen

Of a land of magic so wild and airy

Full of giants and tigers, ghosts and fairies

Wizards and wolves, battles and glories

Told in unicorn songs and old crow stories.

Fierce girls with swords and princes and knights

Went on brave quests, turned wrongs into rights.

They searched for a princess. At last, she was found.

The loneliest princess, lost and then crowned.

So that’s the whole truth and most of the lore

Of the nobody queen, nobody no more.

“Straight As,” Emilie said. “Writing poetry. Won awards. Was in the school play. Who knows what she could’ve done with her life, what she could’ve been? Then one day a monster picks her at random, and the whole story of her life is just…lost. Forever.”

Jeremy didn’t seem to be listening. He read the poem again, looked at the pictures on the collage, tore through the box looking for more.

“Is there anything else?”

“They never found her backpack, so that’s it. You okay?”

He set the box down again.

“Sorry. Having a mild mental breakdown. Ignore me.”

Suddenly, Jeremy sat up straight and ran his hands through his hair, slicking it back. He breathed through his fingers, eyes red like he was trying not to cry.

“Jeremy?”