Summary

An unnamed first-person female narrator, who is Korean and a young adult, suddenly has her younger sister, Hannah, disappear. Both the narrator and Hannah are in college, and their married parents are planning to move from their home of 20 years, in suburban Michigan, back to their native country of Korea. The narrator and her unnamed father frequently begin to bond with one another over the narrator’s graduate studies in mathematics, which had been her father’s favorite subject. The narrator recalls how, days before Hannah had disappeared, Hannah had been disturbed by how the cleaning lady in her Chicago apartment had her infant killed when two neighbor boys had been roughly playing with it, and then dropped the baby out from the deck of the cleaning lady’s tall apartment building.

In Chapter 2, after Hannah has been gone for two weeks, the...