“I’m fine,” she said, which was so obviously a lie. “Did you find my mom yet?”

There was a short pause. “Not yet.”

That gave her some satisfaction. “You won’t find her, you know. Not where you’re looking.”

This time, the pause was weightier. “What do you mean?” Briggs said carefully.

“It means she didn’t run away. She would never.” Dea drew her legs toward her chest. She missed her mom so hard in that second, she ached all over. “You’re wasting your time. You should be looking for the person who took her.” She thought of the surface of glass littering her room at home. She thought of Toby. She wanted to cry. “Now please leave me alone.”

“Listen, Odea.” Briggs was staring at her hard now, as if he could frighten her into giving something away. “We did our homework. You’re not eighteen until June. If you know something that will help us find her, it’s in your best interest to tell us. Otherwise we’ll have to put you into the system. And nobody wants that.”

“And if she comes home and you arrest her, I’ll go into the system anyway, won’t I?” Dea said. Briggs didn’t answer. “Please,” she repeated. “Leave.” She hated herself for saying please to them when she should have just ordered them from her room. She was halfway scared of them, just because of their badges. She pressed the nurse call button to make a point, and a light started beeping and flashing in the hall outside her door. Briggs heaved a big sigh, playing the role of Disappointed Dad.

“We’ll be back,” he said before leaving.

The nurse came—not Donna Sue, but another one, young, with smudgy eye makeup and an attitude—and asked her what she wanted.

“I forgot,” Dea said, which earned her an eye roll. The nurse withdrew, closing the door forcefully. At least they weren’t locking her in. If the doctors really thought she was crazy, they’d probably confiscate her shoelaces and strap her down and make sure she wasn’t trying to hang herself with her bed linens in the middle of the night. Dea’s shoes were stacked neatly in the narrow cupboard near her bed, shoelaces and all.

Dinner was soup and gloppy mac ’n’ cheese and came with a single plastic spoon—she wasn’t sure whether the doctors were deliberately keeping knives away from her. She hadn’t intended to eat but she did anyway, ravenously, realizing that she was starving.

She hadn’t meant to sleep, either, but there was nothing else to do. The nurses flowed in and out, bringing new medication—pills to help the pain, pills to keep her calm, pills to help the pills to help the pain—and then she was falling through the warm, soft surface of her bed, and there was nothing but dark.

THIRTEEN

She woke up in the middle of the night disoriented. For one second she had no idea where she was or how she had arrived there, and her mind spun frantically through all of the places she had lived, trying to latch onto a familiar feeling, an impression of home. Then in an instant her senses sharpened, and she was aware of the constant beeping and the shuffling of footsteps outside her door, and she remembered where she was. Someone had drawn her blinds, but moonlight filtered in between them, striping the linoleum floor.

She was hot and her throat was dry. It was the air in the hospital—too dry, exhaled by too many people, cycled through too many vents. She kicked off her sheets and sat up, her heart slamming hard, her head fuzzy, wondering why she had woken. Something was off—she had a tingling sense of unease, as if someone was standing behind her, breathing on her neck. As if someone was watching her.

Something dark skated across the mirror. Dea’s throat squeezed. A shadow—a trick of the moon. Nothing more.

She swung her legs to the floor and stood up, carefully disentangling the tubes of her IV. Her body felt strange, as if she were made out of different component parts, some hopelessly light, some iron-heavy. She had to steady herself against one wall while the rush of blood to her vision passed. Then she made her way toward the sink, wheeling the IV stand next to her, as she’d practiced doing yesterday when she had to use the bathroom.

She was shocked by her own reflection. Her hair was greasy and matted in places. Her eyes were deep hollows in the dark, and her face was drawn and tight and white as a flame. She looked like something that should be dead. She had the stupidest thought: she was glad Connor hadn’t come.

She drew water from the sink and drank it out of a plastic cup about the size of a thimble, refilling it several times before her throat began to relax. She was still uncomfortably hot, and she bent over to splash water on her face with the hand that wasn’t chained to the IV, gasping a little from the cold, enjoying it. When she straightened up again, for a second she once again thought she saw a shadow move across the mirror—was someone behind her?—but when she turned around she saw nothing but the bed and the rumpled sheets and the looming silhouettes of machinery.

She turned back to the mirror.

A scream worked its way from her chest to her throat and lodged there.

The mirror was moving. It was rippling, like the surface of a lake disturbed by the motion of an animal below it. Her face was breaking apart, dispersing, on miniature wakes. And then, before she could shake the scream loose from her throat, before sound could crystallize on her tongue, her mother’s face appeared: the big blue eyes, the dark hair, even wilder than it usually was. The bags like bruises under her eyes, the etching of smile lines at the corners of her mouth. She looked thin and tired and real.

Real. This was real.

Dea felt the floor swaying underneath her and had to grip the sink to stay on her feet. She hadn’t realized, until then, how terrified she’d been that she would never see her mom’s face again.

“Mom?” she whispered.

Miriam put a finger to her lips, shaking her head. Her eyes clicked to the left, in the direction of the hallway; Dea understood her mother was warning her against speaking too loudly. But Dea didn’t care. Her mother was here and not-here. Her mother was behind the mirror, in it.

She wasn’t dreaming.

“Where are you?” Unconsciously, she leaned forward and placed a hand on the mirror, as though she’d be able to feel her mother’s face. But there was nothing but smooth glass beneath her palm.

Miriam looked temporarily irritated, as if Dea had failed to produce the answer to a very simple math question. She leaned in and brought her mouth to the glass, exhaling. Then she brought a finger to the glass and quickly scratched out a few words in the condensation that patterned her side of the mirror, writing backward so that Dea could read it.

Where do you think?

Almost as soon as Dea read the words, they evaporated.

“Are you coming home?” Dea asked, feeling a rush of panic. She was separated from her mother by a thin pane of glass and by whole worlds. This was crazy. Maybe she did belong in a loony bin.

Dea’s mother shook her head no. There was a pucker between her eyebrows, a deep worry line that Dea had called, when she was little, the dumpling. She was sure she had confused the word dimple for dumpling but the nickname had stuck. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. Her mother’s dumpling was out in full force.

Miriam repeated her trick—exhaling, drawing words backward in the condensation. There isn’t much time.

“Much time for what?” Dea said. Footsteps were squeaking down the hallway, and Dea stiffened. But they passed.

Her mother ignored the question. She swiped away the words with a fist and immediately breathed new vapor onto the glass and began scratching with a finger again.