After, Danny didn’t blame Sam. He blamed himself. The sheriff’s office blamed him, too, for having the gun, agitating the animal; they brought charges for reckless endangerment, but the Larsens got a lawyer, and Danny ended up pleading only to trespassing. From her living room, Sam watched his truck roll up and down their road. No one seemed to stop hiring his company to maintain their lawns. She sometimes heard people mention his name in the grocery store. Sam still had to get groceries, inconceivable as that was to her. She had to eat, in the world where Elena no longer was.

Danny came to their house a single time. Hearing the knock, she knew it had to be him. Who else? They were linked. When she opened the door, she found him, the skin drawn tight over his cheekbones, his forehead creased. His hair was getting shaggy. He said he needed her to know that he loved her sister more than he ever had or ever would love anyone else in the world. He said, “I’m so sorry.”

Inside Sam, a swell, a fall. She said, “Me too.”

Seeing him made her think again of the way he’d clenched the gun’s grip when Sam pulled, required her to return to that day. After that, she hid in the house when he walked his dog. The animal jumped and smiled. When it barked, Sam flinched. It had known Elena—did it know she was gone? It could blame no one for her absence. It didn’t understand the concept of fault.

If Sam’s mother were alive, she would’ve shaken her head at Sam. How could you not trust your sister? she’d have asked. Their mother always insisted Elena knew what she was doing. Sam hadn’t believed her enough.

The San Juan Journal put the blame on the bear, which, its staff argued in a series of opinion pieces and pointed articles, had for weeks been growing bolder, lessening the distance it kept between itself and humankind. The newspaper said it should’ve been hauled away by the state ages before. It had broken into someone’s empty vacation home near Mount Grant, Sam learned, and ripped the dry goods off their pantry shelves. It turned over barbecues in backyards and raided sheds full of livestock feed.

Madeline Pettit could have publicly blamed Elena for that mounting behavior. Sam knew. Elena’s insistence on coming closer to it. The bread she’d held in her cupped hands that very last day. Madeline told them not to bait it, warned them that its actions would escalate in response, but Elena hadn’t heeded her, had encouraged it, and the escalation went beyond even what Madeline foretold. Afterward, Sam waited for the paper to print news of their misdemeanor. To kill Elena again—this time, her legacy. Why wouldn’t Madeline expose them? Madeline, who had given so many warnings to their family, and whom time and teeth had proven right. Instead, Sam received a letter informing her that, in light of the circumstances, the state was no longer pursuing the matter of Elena’s feeding any carnivore.

She got a package, too, from Madeline herself. A neat cardboard box with a plastic bag of soil inside. It was accompanied by a handwritten note, a single sheet, filled by meticulous block letters—striking penmanship—but, then, Sam would expect nothing less. Madeline wrote how very sorry she was for Sam’s loss. What an impression, the few times they’d met, Elena had made on her. How poised Elena had seemed. How lovely.

The soil in the box had been collected from the ground under Elena that day. Growing up, Madeline wrote, she’d been taught by her mother’s family that a person who dies tragically should be buried with whatever their blood last touched, and she didn’t know whether that belief was Catholic or Coeur d’Alene, but it was old and had always rung true to her. It was supposed to give that person peace in the afterlife. Madeline hoped Sam would forgive her the liberty.

She didn’t write about destroying the bear, though Sam knew, from her interactions with authorities in the immediate aftermath, that they had. During those first, impossible days, that knowledge was one of the few things Sam was able to fix on. The state had captured and killed the bear before Elena was cremated. That fast.

And Madeline didn’t write about the bear’s stomach contents, although Sam understood, from one horrifying late-night search on her phone early on when she could not sleep, that was information forensic biologists sought. Sam knew now about the existence of forensic biologists. She stopped going as much on her phone after that. She wanted to erase from her mind every single thing life had ever taught her, but she wasn’t able.

Madeline’s note did say that her office learned the bear had been a grizzly after all. Shocking, Madeline called it, and improbable. A grizzly hadn’t been seen in their part of Washington in living memory. Madeline wrote that what had happened was a tragedy, and that she very much wished, for both Sam’s and Elena’s sakes, she could have established the mutual trust that might have allowed for a different outcome.

The note contained no suggestion of the sisters’ share, the ways they had blocked Madeline from tracking the animal’s movements and habits and shape. But Sam knew. Sam, from the start, had treated Madeline the way her sister ought to have behaved toward the bear. She’d told herself the woman was a danger, and used that as a reason to resist her attraction, and denied, therefore, whatever Madeline offered. Her knowledge. Her state resources. Her availability, her precise kind of care. Sam had shoved all that away while putting her trust in her next-door neighbor and his dumb blond dog, and in her sister, her precious sister, who had been foolish enough to stretch out her arms to a grizzly bear.

Elena…As punishment, Sam read Madeline’s note dozens of times. Hard evidence of her fatal ignorance.

Sam took more shifts than ever. Their routine helped numb her, though one income wasn’t enough to cover the mortgage, obviously. The bank didn’t question anyone’s role in this disaster. It looked only at the numbers. Late that summer, it initiated the process of taking the house. Sam took down the sheets that Elena had fixed to the living room ceiling and stripped the pillowcases their mother had rested her head on. She counted out Elena’s remaining tip money and tucked it away in a suitcase their grandmother left behind.

On the ferry, no one guessed. For a while, snippets of tourists’ conversations floated by about animals, accidents, a local girl’s misfortune, but none of the passengers would ever suspect that Sam had anything to do with their gossip. To them, she was little more than a servant, wiping their endless crumbs away while they talked of excitement elsewhere. That was fine. She used to get upset when they made her Cinderella. She didn’t get upset about that anymore.

Ben found her in the boat’s break room. He held her. She let him. Her sister was gone.

He didn’t blame her. He sat close beside, he wanted to talk. When she shook, he laid his hand, warm, on her back, and moved it in small circles for long enough that Sam passed from horror to something like rest. Under their bodies, the floor lifted and sank with the movement of the waves. Whenever other crew members came in, Ben gestured at them to leave. They understood, he said. He insisted they understand. He told Sam no one could possibly think it was anyone’s fault.

Sam didn’t believe that. If she had left with him before, would that have saved Elena’s life? It could’ve. So might have a million other shifts—if Elena hadn’t gone to work that day. Or if she had crossed paths with the bear farther from the spot Sam and Danny chose to sit, so met it, stroked its face without incident, and moved on. If Elena, instead of serving at the golf club, had been a waitress at a restaurant in town, and needed to drive to and from her shifts. That way, she never, ever would have walked that trail. If she, instead of Sam, had taken the merchant mariner course ten years earlier, and gotten hired on the ferry instead. If their mother hadn’t gotten sick. If their mother’s boyfriend had never moved in. If the sisters had, at the very last moment, gone with Madeline to Mill Creek, and if from that city they had begun the rest of their traveling lives. Afterward, Sam spent all her time thinking about these things: who was responsible, what had brought them here.

How would Elena respond? If she were— That was the thought Sam couldn’t get out of her head. Elena’s voice: You never listen. Or: I love you. One, then the other, then both, then back again. Elena would explain to Sam how special the bear was, how strange and tender their connection, and how it would never intentionally hurt her, but if it did, any pain would be worth the intense, extraordinary, world-expanding experience of getting to stand before it and feel its muzzle brush across her palms. She would say it was all right to die, because through the bear, she’d gotten the chance to really live.

Or: Sammy. You saw how much I suffered. You heard the scraping. Bone on bone, fangs on skull. That bear, in the end, showed how pointless every passion we ever held was.

But Elena was gone. Sam would never find out what she thought of what happened. All Sam could hear, now, was her own voice whispering that it was Sam’s fault. Wasn’t it? No matter what anyone else said or didn’t say. Hadn’t she known that in the first instant of the bear’s lunge and every day after? Sam ate her meals, she went to work, she kept hearing it. She always would. She remembered the trigger guard under her finger. Its curve, its give. Blame became her companion; blame filled the place her sister had occupied.