Hollow is the owner of and head designer at House of Hollow, whose creations have become some of the most sought-after in the industry after the label’s launch at Paris Fashion Week just under eighteen months ago.
One of the first things I tell her is that stitching bits of paper into her creations reminds me of another infamous unsolved crime: the mystery of the Somerton man. In 1948, an unidentified man was found dead on a beach in Australia. All the labels had been cut from his clothing, and police later found a tiny scroll of rolled-up paper sewn into his pants pocket. It read “Tamám Shud,” which means “finished” in Persian. The words had been torn from the final page of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
“That’s where I got the initial inspiration from,” Hollow says eagerly as she wraps her long fingers—preternaturally dexterous, like she’s a seamstress who’s been working for a hundred years—around a cup of unsweetened Ceylon tea. Her voice is surprisingly deep, and she rarely blinks. With white-blond hair, black eyes, and a smattering of freckles across her nose year-round, she is the definition of ethereal. I have interviewed many beautiful women, but none so truly otherworldly. “As a child I was obsessed with mysteries—probably because I was one.”
I’m under strict instructions from her publicist not to ask her about the missing month, but since she was the one who brought it up, I press my luck.
Does she really not remember anything?
“Of course I remember,” she says, her ink-drop gaze holding mine. Her smile is slight, sly; the same mischievous pixie grin that has made her famous. “I remember everything. You just wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
The article continued, but I came to a snap stop at that line, the line that Vivi had no doubt been talking about: Of course I remember. I remember everything.
You just wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
The words sank into me like acid, dissolving my flesh. I snapped the Vogue shut and sat on Grey’s bare bed, my hand pressed over my mouth.
“Yeah,” Vivi said heavily.
“That cannot be true.”
When I was seven years old, I vanished without a trace for a whole month.
On the very rare occasion she drank enough wine to talk about it, my mother emphasized the impossibility of it. How we were walking through the warren of lanes of Edinburgh’s Old Town, back to our father’s parents’ house. How we were there one moment, then gone the next. How she took her eyes off us for a second or two, long enough to peck our father on the cheek when the New Year’s fireworks began. How she heard nothing, saw no one—simply looked up to find the street before her empty. A lace-fine snow was falling through the air, the kind that melts when it hits the sidewalk. The alleyway was lit by oily slicks of light and pops of effervescence from the overhead starbursts.
Where there should have been three children, there were none.
Cate smiled at first; she thought we were playing with her. “Iris, Vivi, Grey, come out, come out, wherever you are,” she sang. We were bad at hide-and-seek, but she always pretended to take forever to find us. No giggles answered her this time. No whispers. Immediately, she knew something was wrong. In her first statement to the police, Cate would say that the air tasted burnt and smelled of wild, wet animal. That the only thing out of place on the street was a handful of fall leaves and white flowers on the stoop of a house that had burned down the month before. That was the first place she looked for us. All that had survived the flames of the fire was a freestanding doorframe, held up by nothing. My mother stepped through it and called our names and wandered from room to room in the shell of burnt-out bricks and rubble, her panic rising.
We weren’t there. We weren’t anywhere. It was like the cobblestones had opened up and swallowed us.
My father, Gabe, when he was alive, filled in the rest of the story. How he called the police less than five minutes after we disappeared. How he banged on the doors of every house on the street, but no one had seen us. How you could hear people calling our names—Iris! Vivi! Grey!—from one end of Old Town to the other, until the sun rose and the searchers went home to rest their throats and hug their sleeping