4 YEARS AGO (JUNE)

Liv existed within a waterfall, horrifying events cascading down around her as she struggled to keep from being sucked into the flow, her body bashed before drowning under the weight of misery.

Her sister, dead. Helina, gone—likely staying at Richie's, not yet ready to face Liv. Liv's mother, checked out as ever, off in Minnesota with her latest loser boyfriend. She had made a great wailing noise on the phone when Liv called to give her the news, slobbering about how awful this was, how she'd already been through so much, and now this: her youngest, dead before her nineteenth birthday.

When Liv asked if she wanted to come to Madison, maybe have some sort of memorial, or at least comfort each other in their mourning, the floodgates closed. That wouldn't be necessary. We mourn in our own way, don't we? Would it bring Penelope back if I came all that way? Besides, Ajax doesn't want to go and he doesn't want me to go either. Excuse after excuse to leave Liv to deal with the aftermath on her own.

Following that conversation, Liv stopped talking to her mom completely, but she didn't stop thinking about what her mother had said. Penelope, dead before her nineteenth birthday. Eight days before, to be precise.

Liv did the math. Her sister had died at 18.98 years old to the day. Her heart, what was left of it, shriveled up like a sun-dried tomato. Those mysterious forces that communicated with her through the ghost frequency were toying with her, and Penelope had died right when they wanted her to, all so they could laugh at Liv.

She stood under a Niagara Falls of grief and in her grief, with her dried-up heart, she placed the blame where it was easiest. Helina. She'd acted selfishly, ignoring warnings, and Pen had paid the price.

She could not be forgiven for this.

Drenched in misery, Liv walked through life. She graduated but didn't go to the ceremony. She was offered a job and accepted it without looking at other options. She had her sister's remains cremated and on what would have been her 19th birthday, eight days after her death, she placed them in a box in her closet.

Two days later, Helina returned to their apartment to pack up her things. "I'm going home to Washington," she told her.

Liv said nothing.

"Richie is going to drive me and my stuff out there. Kind of our last hurrah. I told him I don't want to do a long-distance thing and he said he understands."

Liv got off the couch and walked into her room, closing her door behind her.

"Liv?" Helina knocked on the door, not even giving Liv a minute of peace. With no response from Liv, she talked anyways. "The network shut down contract negotiations. I thought you'd want to know. They said Penelope's death, while a personal tragedy that they're very sorry about, is too recent to play well with audiences—those are their words, not mine. I know what that sounds like. All they care about are how viewers will see the situation. It would look like we were profiting off her death. Which we totally wouldn't be, obviously."

That was what Helina cared about ultimately, then. Her television deal was gone because she'd been stupid enough to get Penelope killed.

Liv's skin grew hot. Her waterfall of grief became a steaming cauldron of rage. She curled her fingers around the metal stem of her floor lamp and imagined smacking Helina in the head with it, her hair sparking when the lightbulbs burst against her skull.

"Are you really not going to say anything to me, Liv? I miss her too, you know."

Liv seethed. How much Helina must miss her! Helina, who had a brother and parents and a whole life to go back to two thousand miles away. Helina, who could forget about Liv and Penelope, and carry on with life without feeling a crushing weight of guilt on her shoulders. She talked about missing Pen, but she'd lost a TV deal first and foremost, whereas Liv had lost the only true family she had left.

Releasing the lamp, she opened her door instead. "Leave. Pack up your shit and get out of here. I don't want to see you or hear from you ever again."

Helina's face fell. "You don't mean that."

"The hell I don't."

Helina tried to move in for one of her customary hugs, but Liv blocked her with an elbow to the chest.

"This doesn't have to be the end of... of everything." Helina wrapped her arms around herself, an empty, Liv-less hug. "What happened was awful. Neither of us will ever be the same, but do we just go our separate ways like nothing we built together matters? We can work through this, Liv. It doesn't have to destroy either of us. Pen wouldn't have wanted that."

Liv's fingers itched to pick up the lamp, to knock some sense into her. "I think Pen would have wanted to have her neck unbroken and her face un-smashed and lunges still capable of taking air into her body. But she doesn't have any of that, does she? She has a cardboard box full of ash. That's all."

"Liv, come on. You know what I mean."

"We don't know what the fuck she would have wanted!" Screaming at Helina felt almost as good as the thought of hitting her. "All I know is what I want. I want you far, far away from me." She pointed her finger at her former best friend. "You put her in harm's way. You killed her, Helina."

"I didn't! You weren't there. Something... something lifted her in the air and then, it let her fall. I tried to stop it, but what could I have done?"

"You know what you could have done. Not gone there in the first place. You had warning. From me!" Done yelling, she began to close her door again before her fantasy of striking Helina became a reality. "This is it for you and me. I wish I'd never met you."

Helina didn't attempt to talk to her after that. Liv remained in her room, listening to the sounds of boxes being taped up. After a while, Richie's voice joined the mix and they went in and out of the apartment, carrying away Helina's things, along with the life they'd shared together.

By evening, Helina was gone. Liv celebrated her absence by lying on her couch for six hours, watching documentaries about serial killers and alien encounters and chupacabra. Around one in the morning, she made her way to her bedroom. As soon as she set foot in it, reality shifted. She was too tired, too inundated with her grief waterfall to care much about what was happening.

Let in the nightmare. Let the monster come for me. What more can it do?

The cloud swirled through the room like smoke rings. She waited for the haunting to commence, for odd creatures to grab her arms and stroke her hair. The cloud circled around itself, then shot out a loop of silver, which settled over Liv like a lasso, drawing her towards its spiraling center, and at its center, her closet and the box holding Penelope's ashes.

"Pen," she whispered.

The storm cloud swirled. She longed to join her sister in that box. Let their remains intermix so they could live in their death together. What did it matter then if she was in this world or the world of the dead or whatever monstrous realm she'd opened herself to. She'd be with Penelope and this cascading waterfall would cease to be. She'd cease to be.

"Not yet," a voice spoke.

"Fuck you," she said back, ready for a fight, or to plead her case. "Bring me back my sister."

The room cleared. Liv crouched next to her open closet door. Around her, an ordinariness and nothing more.

Nothing. This is what others see, she realized. How ignorant the world is, not knowing they are in a constant storm.

Two weeks after Penelope's death, Liv started her new job at an environmental testing lab. It was entry level, but offered advancement if she did well, and that's what Liv intended to do. She'd pour herself into work. She'd do well at her job because there wasn't anything else left in her life besides it.

She would work and wait. Her supervisor, Dara, aware of Penelope's death from the professor who recommended Liv for the job, gave her the eggshell treatment. Liv was afforded space and time to learn her work. Dara placed a box of tissues on her desk, just in case, and let Liv know she was there if she needed to talk.

Liv appreciated the sentiment, but it wasn't necessary. She wasn't an egg and if she cracked, it wouldn't be in her beige cubicle. Five days into the first professional, non-ghost-related job she'd ever had, Liv headed home to spend the weekend on her couch, moving as little as possible, all her energy used up to do her job and appear to be a normal person.

The storm cloud was waiting for her—she could feel its presence as she fit her key into the lock. Sure enough, it took up the whole apartment, squeezing out the daylight and making Liv feel like she was on the set of a Victorian-era vampire movie.

"What now?" she asked it. "Do your worst, asshole."

"Liv."

Liv let out a sob. That voice. She hadn't ever thought she'd hear it again.

"Penelope?" She turned around several times. Her apartment may as well not exist for all she could see of it now. Thick fog, like driving way up north late at night. "Where are you?"

This had to be a deception. Another trick instigated by the inhabitants of this hell dimension, making her believe her sister was here with her when she was gone and would never be with Liv again. But it was a lie she wanted to embrace and so she begged for its continuance.

"Just tell me what you need from me. Please, Pen."

At first, nothing but the swirling storm, and then, a number repeating through Liv's mind a million times in a minute. And then, the end of the storm. An apartment re-emerged. Normalcy, or what passed for it.

Liv wrote down the number, or rather, two numbers. She knew immediately what they were.

"Coordinates," she said. "Thank you."

She expected them to lead her to Penelope, made alive, made whole, as ridiculous as that sounded when she thought about it later. Instead, the next morning, they lead her to a ravine two hours north of Madison where the body of Allen Chen lay, his bloated hand palm up, offering Liv a rain-soaked slip of paper. On it, one line of text, scrawled in barely legible bleeding ink.

"There's no coming back."