THE DOORBELL RANG SOON AFTER I got back to the house after my run, catching me while I was getting ready to shower. My parents were out grocery shopping, according to the note they’d left on the table, so I pulled my sweatpants back on, tossed on a clean shirt, and headed downstairs to answer the door. The doorbell rang again right as I opened the door to reveal a police officer standing on our porch, his finger still on the bell.

It was the same one who’d come to our house before, except this time he was holding a medium-sized cardboard box. When he saw me, he took a half step back and tightened his grip on it.

“Hello. Are your parents home?” he asked.

“No, they’re out.”

“Oh.” He looked down at the box and then up at me. “I’m here to give this to them.”

“What is it?”

“It’s her things, your sister’s things,” he said. He flushed, his pink skin turning a deep shade of salmon. “They should have been returned earlier but they got misfiled.”

I wondered if misfiled was simply a polite term for their having gotten left in some random room or shoved under someone’s desk, slowly getting buried beneath a layer of papers and miscellaneous office supplies.

“Fine,” I said. “I can take it.” I reached for the box.

He seemed unclear as to whether this was an acceptable option and continued to hold the box close to his body.

“Give it to me,” I said.

He didn’t so much hand it over as reluctantly allow me to free it from his grasp. I gave him a few extra seconds in case there was something he needed to add. He said nothing, just continued standing there with an uncertain look on his face. I gave him a small wave, for politeness’s sake, and then closed the door.

I took the box up to my room. I sat on my bed and held the box tight to my chest. I thought about Anna, about how wrong I’d been about what we were to each other, about how little she’d wanted me to know about her life.

I wondered if I had any right to look at what was inside.

I sat for a long time before I opened it. I felt guilty, like a thief, as I took out each item and laid it on my bed.

First, her phone, the screen smashed. I tried turning it on. Nothing. I put it aside.

After her phone came her shoes, tights, dress, cardigan, underwear, and hair clip. Everything she had been wearing that night, neatly folded. The idea of a policeman, or even policewoman, touching her socks, her underwear, made my stomach clench. It was difficult to accept how after her death nothing had been private anymore.

I ran my hands over her cardigan. I remembered her wearing it after she first got it, just months earlier, how I’d been envious of how warm it looked. In my arms, it was heavy and soft, but when I raised it to my face it didn’t smell like Anna; it smelled like detergent. Not even the detergent we used. They must have washed it. I didn’t want to think about why they’d have done that.

I left the cardigan draped over my lap as I unfolded the dress. It was a deep, dark purple—eggplant, I guess it would be called. Toward the bottom edge a button was missing, only a scrap of thread left behind. I searched the box to see if it had fallen off inside, but it wasn’t there. It must have fallen off that night. When she fell.

I laid the dress on my bed and then I went outside, to the back of our house, to the stretch of grass beneath Anna’s window. I got down on my knees and searched the grass, the dirt and stones beneath it, looking for the white button, for that glint of pearl, planning to sew it back onto the dress. I wanted to make one small thing of hers whole again, the way it should be.

I couldn’t find it, not even after I expanded the area I searched, trying to account for its being moved around under layers of snow and ice. I kept searching, though, until I heard my parents’ car coming up the drive. Only then did I dive back into the house and run upstairs to the bathroom, where I scrubbed my hands so they wouldn’t question me about the layer of dirt under my nails.

And before I went downstairs for dinner, I refolded the dress and cardigan and tucked them back in the box. I was about to add her phone as well, but I hesitated. I ultimately set it aside, and then gently slid the box, with the rest of Anna’s things, under my bed, out of sight.

I didn’t want anyone else touching her things. They’d been touched too much already.