Chapter 1: The Cover-Up With the Crooked Sun
My sixteen-year-old daughter, Nora, disappeared from a crowded beach eight years ago.
She told me she was heading down to the ice cream stand at the far end.
I watched her go.
I remember thinking she'd gotten tall over the winter.
Twenty minutes later, her towel was still on the sand next to mine, her sandals were on top of it, and her phone was face-down in her bag.
Lifeguards went into the water.
Police checked the bathrooms, the parking lot, the hotels, every road leading away from that beach.
They found the ice cream stand.
Nobody working it remembered her.
They found nothing.
She'd been wearing a turquoise cover-up my mother had sewn for her that spring.
Grandma had embroidered her initials inside the hem — N.
V.
On the first day of that trip, Nora caught one corner on a piece of driftwood, so my mother stitched a crooked little yellow sun over the hole, and Nora laughed and said she liked it better ruined.
That's the last thing I ever saw her wear.
I have one photograph of her in it, taken about forty minutes before she walked off.
Eight years later, my husband talked me into a weekend at a coastal town almost six hundred miles from home.
I hadn't willingly stepped onto a beach since.
We were passing a café near the boardwalk when I noticed a woman standing with her back to me.
Fifty, maybe a little older.
Faded turquoise cover-up.
I told myself half the women on that coast owned something turquoise.
Then the wind lifted one corner, and I saw the sun.
I don't remember crossing the terrace.
"Excuse me.
Where did you get that?"
She looked down at herself, then back at me.
"I've had this for years."
"Where did you get it?"
My hands were shaking so badly I dropped my phone twice before I got the photograph open.
I held it up — Nora on the sand in that cover-up, squinting into the sun, forty minutes left.
The woman stopped moving.
She looked at the screen for a long time.
Then she looked past me, at something over my shoulder, and her hand closed around my wrist.
May you like
"Put that away," she said quietly.
"She can't know you're here."
