CHAPTER 1: The Last Thing I Said to Her

I drove home on a Thursday.

The bag was in the back seat.

The photograph — the one Carol had found in the pocket — was in my coat, where it had been since the boardwalk.

I stopped once, at a rest area outside of Delaware, and sat in the parking lot for a few minutes with the engine off.

Not crying.

Just sitting.

I thought about the toothbrush I'd finally thrown away in 2017.

I thought about the library card.

I thought about Detective Pruitt and the man in Nevada and the five years of people not saying her name.

I thought about Patrice sitting across from me at the kitchen table at midnight with an envelope she'd carried for fourteen years.

I thought about Rosie crouched on the floor of her apartment, holding her hand out for the cat.

I started the car and drove home.

That evening I called Patrice.

"She's alive," I said.

"She's okay.

She's built a life."

Patrice didn't say anything for a moment.

When she did, her voice was not the careful controlled one.

"I'm so glad," she said.

"Diane, I'm so sorry I didn't—"

"I know," I said.

"We'll talk about it.

Not tonight."

"Okay."

"Thank you for keeping the letter," I said.

"I mean that.

Thank you for keeping it."

I hung up and sat at the kitchen table for a while.

Then I went to the cabinet under the stairs where I keep things I don't know what to do with — old cards, photographs, the small accumulated evidence of a life — and I found the box I was looking for.

Inside was a library card.

Her name on it, renewed the second time in 2014 with a new expiration date I'd filled in myself, knowing it made no practical sense, doing it anyway.

I set it on the table.

Then I went to the bathroom and looked at the cup on the sink.

There were two toothbrushes in it now.

Mine, and one I'd put there three days before I drove to Virginia, the morning I'd decided I was going to find her.

I hadn't let myself think about why I'd done that.

I thought about it now.

I left it there.

The following month I drove back to Kellerton.

Rosie met me at the door of her apartment with the cat under one arm and a look on her face that was not quite a smile but was close.

She had made coffee.

She had remembered how I take it.

We sat at her kitchen table and talked for four hours.

About nothing important, mostly.

Her regulars at the alterations shop.

A difficult hem.

A customer who brought in the same coat every winter.

The cat's opinions about rain.

At one point she said, "I want to tell you everything.

About all of it.

But not all at once."

"That's fine," I said.

"We have time."

She looked at me when I said that.

Something in her face shifted, very slightly, the way it does when a thing you'd stopped believing in turns out to still be true.

"Yeah," she said.

"I think we do."

I drove home that evening with the window down.

The bag was in the back seat again.

I'd brought it with me, and when I'd shown it to her she'd held it for a long time and run her thumb over the crooked handle and then handed it back to me.

"You keep it," she said.

"It's yours."

"I know." She'd met my eyes.

"But I know where it is now."

The last thing I said to her, standing in the doorway of her apartment on Deering Street, was: "I'll see you next month."

She said, "I'll be here."

She didn't slam the door.

She closed it gently, and I heard the lock turn, and I stood in the hallway for a moment before I walked back down the stairs into the evening.

For the first time in sixteen years, I knew exactly where she was.

I made the drive home in just under four hours.

I made coffee for one when I got in.

I sat down at the kitchen table.