It’s 2007, and you’re seventeen, pressing your forehead against the cold window of a yellow cab as Manhattan smears by in rain and neon. John is sitting next to you, humming tunelessly under his breath, tapping out a rhythm on his knee with calloused fingers that still look like they belong to someone half his age. Yoko is on your other side, tiny and composed, typing quickly on her Blackberry with rings clicking softly against the keys, her black hair pulled back, her face as calm and unreadable as the moon.

They had you late, so late that people often stare when you’re all out together. Strangers assume they’re your grandparents, or that John is your weird uncle babysitting you in the Village while you nurse a chai latte and scribble lyrics in your notebook. But you’re their only daughter, the one they got to keep, born into a world of floor-length windows, incense smoke curling in the air, and Polaroids of you in John’s arms, his hair falling into his eyes as he looks at you like you’re the last piece of a song he finally found.

You know about Kyoko, even though you’ve never met her. You know the shape of the space she left, the way it follows Yoko around like a shadow. Sometimes, you wake up at night to get water and find Yoko at the kitchen table, eyes distant, a cup of cold tea in front of her. Once, when you were thirteen, you asked quietly, “Are you thinking about Kyoko?” and Yoko only looked at you with soft eyes and nodded, whispering, “I hope she’s safe,” in a voice so small you almost didn’t hear it.

You’ve seen the old newspaper clippings. You’ve read the stories online late at night on your flip phone: how Kyoko was taken, how Yoko searched and searched, how the world kept turning while a mother lost her daughter to a cult’s steel doors.

At seventeen, you live with that quiet heaviness, this invisible sister you’ve never known, and you wonder if you look like her when you catch your reflection in shop windows, if she likes the same minor chords John taught you on guitar, if she would have shown you how to braid your hair properly.

Tonight, John is carrying your guitar because you’re playing your first open mic at a small café in Brooklyn. Your hands won’t stop shaking, and you’re pulling at the frayed cuffs of your army jacket, trying to hide how scared you are.

“Don’t be nervous, love,” John says, giving you a lopsided grin that’s all warmth, the lines around his eyes folding like paper.

“I’m not,” you lie, shifting the strap of your guitar on your shoulder.

John laughs softly, “It’s only music. Let it out.”

Yoko glances up from her phone and places her hand over yours. Her hands are small, warm, and certain, her rings cool against your skin. “You have your own voice. That’s your power.”

The café smells like coffee and rain, the walls covered in old posters, the mic crackling softly as you set up. Your voice trembles on the first verse, but you catch John in the back, eyes bright, nodding in rhythm, and Yoko’s soft, encouraging smile, and you remember to breathe.

You sing about being seventeen, about the empty space where a sister should be, about growing up in a city that never sleeps while your parents’ past still flickers in the hallways of your home like an old film reel. About loving them fiercely anyway, even with the ghosts they carry.

When you finish, there is a hush before the applause, and John claps loudly, whooping in a way that makes you flush, and Yoko’s eyes glisten, her hands pressed together.

That night, back in the apartment, the city lights dancing across the ceiling, John plays you an old demo tape on the reel-to-reel. You lie on the floor, letting the warmth of the guitar and his voice fill the quiet, while Yoko leans back in the armchair, her eyes soft, the edges of her lips turned up.

You know there are parts of them you can’t touch, stories you can’t fix, and daughters Yoko will always miss. But in this moment, you are seventeen, it’s 2007