She remembered telling Neal on the roof of the FBI building that her parents were dead. Of course she'd also told him she was an only child. She pressed play on the answering machine and the "Hello Sara, sweetheart, your father and I were planning on coming up to New York for Christmas this year, an we wanted to know if you would be able to put us up, or do we have to stay in a hotel? Well anyway, we love you, can't wait to see you, Bye now," recorded on it.

She restrained herself from putting her head on the counter, or from calling her mother up to yell, "Hotel, please dear God, stay in a hotel, or better yet, don't come. Just have a nice, quiet, little holiday, away from me!"

Most of her belongings had somehow migrated to Neal's, her house abandoned most nights. And she could just see her parents' faces, and the way they would just know when she brought them inside, the way they would know,and pick at it, and everything would seem so normal. She wanted to say to them, "Just pretend I'm there. You're already doing that with one daughter."

Every year, there had been an extra set of presents from her parents, wrapped and hidden away, waiting for the day her sister would miraculously return. They sat dusty and ignored with birthday presents, and piles of well wishes, and the gifts that every year, her mother had dragged her out to buy for a sister who was never going to come back and open them. Every year, her parents set them out under the tree, and every year when she saw them, Sara wanted to scream, and yell at her parents for doing it again, for reminding everybody all over again that she was gone.

They didn't do that anymore. The unopened presents were probably in a storage container somewhere, gathering more dust, and more layers of guilt. Sara almost missed them. At least when they were there, sitting under the tree like talismans to bring her sister home, she could point to them and say, "See? This is what's wrong."

Now there was nothing that anybody else saw. There were no more outward signs to betray just how broken and warped it still was.

She wondered if it would have been easier if she had been an only child, if her parents really had been deceased, if there had been no explanations following her return to life, no effects following her supposed death because there was no one around to care instead of a family she made unable to contact. She wondered if it meant that one day, she was going to disappear just like her sister, and if her parents were going to keep buying presents for her in the hopes that she would return. She wondered if her parents would ever learn she had died, and if she ever wanted them to, someday, when it happened.