Jennifer Thomas is no longer missing; at least not to me.

She is no longer a smiling face printed onto a stack of posters that I left in the trash. She is flesh and blood, emphasis on blood, and she is breathing in a way that suggests she is gravely ill.

I look Jennifer over, but I can’t see any wounds. “Where is all the blood coming from?” I ask breathlessly, kneeling beside Damon. He puts a hand on her stomach — her swollen stomach — and that’s when I realize she is pregnant.

“She’s having a miscarriage?” I ask. Damon runs a bloody hand through his hair. “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

I touch Jennifer’s hand; it is drenched with blood, warm and slippery. She hasn’t uttered a word yet; as my eyes adjust to the dim light, I can see why. Tape on her mouth. Tape around her wrists. This poor girl isn’t just bleeding to death; she’s doing so completely unable to move or speak.

“I’ll call an ambulance,” I whisper, realizing I’ve got my phone in my hand. I must have carried it up here. I stand as I unlock it and start to dial, nine, one, but I don’t get to punch in the third one. Damon follows my movements, snatching the phone out of my hand with his wet fingers, Jennifer’s blood streaking across my palms like angry lashes of a cane.

“Damon,” I say urgently, glancing down at Jennifer. “She’s bleeding everywhere. We have to call an ambulance. Now.”

“No.” He takes my phone and throws it down the stairs, all the way to the kitchen where I hear it shatter. I bite my lip and try not to cry as I look around the attic for a weapon, for something.

“Damon,” I try again. I keep glancing at Jennifer because I want to make sure she’s still alive. She is. She’s hyperventilating, her skin lily-white, her breaths dangerously shallow.

“No!” Damon roars. I slap him across the face, so hard that my wrist goes numb and fresh blood beads along Damon’s bottom lip. Good. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but she’s going to die.”

Damon takes a step back. “We need to call Ray.”

“Call an ambulance,” I urge him. “Or don’t. We can dump her in front of a hospital and leave. Damon, if you don’t get her to a hospital, she’s going to die.”

Jennifer Thomas is in my attic, dying. Damon was getting me to put up posters of her beaming face in the cold, in the snow, while she was in our fucking house.

I kneel beside her, ripping away the tape that binds her wrists until my fingernails break, unsure of what else I can do. Damon has a gun. I have nothing but a pair of threadbare pajamas and a full bladder. Damon dials his brother and hands the phone to me. “Tell him to hurry.”

He’s in Reno, I think. Or possibly Vegas. How is he going to hurry?

I swipe the phone from his hand and press it to my ear. Ray answers almost immediately. “Ray,” I begin before he can start.

“Oh, hey, little lady,” Ray replies, his voice taking on a predatory edge that I don’t like. “I was just thinking about you.”

I’m sure you were.

Ray,” I interject. “Listen. You have to call us an ambulance —”

His tone change immediately. “Is my brother all right? What’s happened?”

I roll my eyes, patting Jennifer’s shoulder with my free hand. “Damon is fine. Jennifer and her baby are not fine.”

Damon rips the phone from my hand. “No ambulances,” he barks, pacing the length of the attic. “You need to get here, now.”

I can’t hear what Ray is saying anymore. I look down at Jennifer, realizing she’s quiet because of the duct tape across her mouth. Wincing, I locate an edge of the tape and pull it from her mouth in one swift rip. She’s in so much pain already, she barely reacts.

“Jenny,” I whisper. “What happened? Who did this to you?”

Her eyes dart to Damon momentarily before looking back at me.

“You did this to yourself, Jennifer,” Damon mutters.

Jennifer cowers beneath my hands as Damon addresses her.

“Do you think you can walk if I support you?” I ask. Jennifer shrugs, tears streaming from her eyes. I’ve never seen so much blood in my life, and why won’t Damon call an ambulance for this poor girl? I can’t even fathom how she came to be up here. I can’t bear the thought that she might have been above me as I slept this entire time; that I could have somehow saved her before this.

Suddenly, Jennifer squeezes my hand hard enough that my bones hurt, a wail coming from her mouth. She’s bearing down, her face scrunched up, her eyes closed as a wave of something paralyzes her.

“Contractions,” I mutter. “Damon. She’s having contractions. It’s too early for this baby to be born.” I’m no doctor, but her stomach, although clearly protruding, is tiny. She’s barely in her second trimester.

“We have to call the police,” I say to Damon.

He grits his teeth so hard, I think they might shatter from the pressure. “I AM the fucking police, you stupid girl.”

The cogs in my sleep-addled brain are starting to turn. But I barely have time to voice my suspicions because Jennifer is screaming. I look to Damon, who responds by slapping his hand over her mouth to drown out the noise.

“Be quiet,” he hisses. She shrinks away from him, terrified. I know that feeling. Something tells me that Jennifer knows it much more intimately than me, though.

Jennifer’s contraction subsides, and Damon takes his hand away. She tries to sit up, balanced on her elbows. “I can f-feel something,” she whispers. “I need to push. Oh, God.” Her hands are tied but her legs are free, and she’s trying to open them wider.

I look at Damon for a moment, before my instincts propel me. I scoot around so I’m in the juncture created by Jennifer’s legs, the dim light only showing me a vague outline. She screams once more, and something wet and dark slides out of her.

“Oh, Jesus,” I stammer. Jennifer’s elbows go out from under her, the sound of her skull hitting the floorboards sickening. A rush of dark red blood surges from between her legs, pooling beneath her.

“I think the baby came out,” I whisper. Jennifer isn’t moving anymore; her knees fall together, her eyes flutter shut. Damon, wide-eyed and probably in shock, shoves me aside as he discovers the avocado-sized lump on the floor that, in exiting its mother too early, has just caused her to die horrifically.

“No,” Damon whispers. “No, no, no.” He sits back on his heels, the tiny baby in his hands, Jennifer’s blood all over him, all over me, all over the attic.

Jennifer’s eyes are still open, staring at the ceiling, unseeing. I put two fingers to her neck to check for a pulse. Nothing. I use those same fingers to press her eyelids shut. I’m not a religious person, but I put my palms together and say a prayer for Jennifer Thomas anyway because if I don’t, nobody will.

Ray is soothing. Ray is kind. To his brother, he is these things.

While Damon refuses to let go of the tiny baby Jennifer birthed — while Damon loses his fucking mind — Ray speaks softly to him. I have never heard the kindness in him but he possesses it, in his own way. He takes the baby in his hands and gives it to me, even though I don’t want it. I take it, anyway, fresh shellshock running up and down my limbs as I stand in the middle of the attic.

Ray takes Damon away, out of the attic, and I am left alone with Jennifer and her baby. I hear the shower turn on, and a few moments later, Ray reappears in the attic. I place the baby on its mother’s chest, looking to Ray for - what? Permission? Instruction? My own ending?

I knew the moment that Ray arrived that he might kill me. Damon might love me, but Ray doesn’t. I see the indifference in his eyes, the calculations. I am a loose thread. He is figuring out how to tie me up.

“Are we going to have a problem?” he asks me. I shake my head emphatically.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“No,” I reply. “No problems. I swear.”

“Good,” he says, apparently satisfied. “Find a box for that.” He jabs a finger toward Jennifer.

“For Jennifer?” I ask.

He looks impatient. “For the kid.”

“Oh.”

He leaves the attic again and I look around properly for the first time. My whole focus has been on Jennifer and her baby, but now I look past them, to the large pine box she was obviously locked in, the padlock hanging loose, the lid flipped open. I peer inside the box to see ordinary things, things you wouldn’t equate with death and dying. A pillow. Blankets. An iPod, ear bud headphones still attached. Gingerly, I lift one of the ear buds to my ear. It’s blasting music. I don’t listen long enough to hear what’s playing.

I search the room for a box. My eyes land on a stack of milk cartons in the corner, meticulously stacked, almost as tall as me. Making sure I’m still alone, I take one of the cartons from the pile.

It’s old and waxy, just like the one I found downstairs when Ray interrupted me last week. But this carton is different. The picture on the side hasn’t been rubbed out.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?

Every hair on my arms stands on end as if I’ve been electrified. They used to put missing kids on milk cartons. Isn’t that exactly what Damon said to me in the kitchen the morning Jennifer’s disappearance broke on the news? I study the grainy black and white image of the kid pictured. Daniel Collins, aged ten. Went missing from the sidewalk outside his house on August 26^th, 1987.

It was his tenth birthday. He’d been checking the mailbox, and then he was just gone.

I memorize the date and the name, putting the carton back in its spot and selecting another one. It’s identical. I check two cartons, then five, ten. They’re all the fucking same. Daniel Collins, born 1977, disappeared 1987. I don’t recognize the face on the photo, it’s so grainy and blurred, but I store the name in the recesses of my mind for future reference.

I hear movement downstairs and leave the milk cartons, spying a box I know I can use. My mother’s wedding dress from when she married my father, something I thought Damon would have insisted she throw out after he moved in. It’s heart-shaped, and I take the lid off gently, mindful that my bloody fingerprints are now all over it. I’m a part of this, now. I am an accomplice. I am complicit.

Better to be an accomplice than to be dead, I suppose.

Inside is a smaller box, identical heart-shaped cardboard, among the stiff old silk. I take the smaller box out and lay it on the floor beside Jennifer, mindful to keep it away from the blood pooled beneath her body. This box contains my mother’s veil; the most beautiful French lace, material she found at a thrift store and sewed herself while I grew in her belly. I take Jennifer’s tiny baby from her chest and place it in the pile of lace, covering it as best I can, before replacing the lid.

“Cassie!” Ray’s voice cuts through the buzz in my ears. I leave the heart-shaped box and follow the sound of my name downstairs to the bathroom beside my bedroom.

It’s easier to cope with the sheer volume of blood upstairs, in the dark; here, it is lit up in Technicolor. Damon is sitting in the bottom of the bath, his face in his hands. He did not shed a single tear when my mother died, apart from the few fake ones he squeezed out at her funeral, but here, in the wake of Jennifer and her baby — he sobs like a broken child. Ray hears me enter the small space and steps back, his bloody hand immediately fishing a cigarette from his jeans pocket and lighting up.

“Come on, brother,” Ray says quietly.

Damon is shaking violently; covered in the blood of his child’s life and death, in the bottom of the empty bath. I look to Ray; he gestures with the cigarette in Damon’s general direction. There are no words exchanged but his meaning is clear — fix that.

So I do what comes via instinct; I undress Damon as best I can, blood-slicked fingers fumbling with the buttons on his uniform, the tan stained a red so dark it’s almost black. I get his socks off, his shirt, his boxer briefs, and the key from around his neck that hangs on a thin chain. I’ve never seen it before, but I don’t have time to study it. I set it all beside the bath in a pile, and then I turn the faucet on, warm water shooting down and slowly, ever-so-slowly washing Jennifer’s blood from his skin.

I scrub the red from his body as if he’s a child muddied from playing in the rain instead of a murderer bloodied from keeping a girl tied up in his attic. His blue eyes stare at the wall at the end of the bath, unfocused, unseeing. He is somewhere else. When he’s finally clean, I shut off the water and wrap a towel around his shoulders.

I can’t breathe properly. My chest hurts. I have too many questions. The blood is gone and I need something to drink. Maybe I’ll tip a bottle of bleach down my throat and end it all before something like this happens to me.

I stand on shaking legs and walk toward the hallway. As I’m about to step out of the bathroom, Ray stands in the doorway, his bulk blocking my path. He looks me up and down, fixing his eyes on mine. The message is clear: You’re not going anywhere.

Ray smokes. Damon stares. I stand between the two brothers, biting the insides of my cheeks until I taste blood.