“I don’t know. I only saw him the once. I didn’t like the way he was watching me, so I left. He said he knew me, I said he didn’t. That was pretty much it.” It was instinct, how I answered with the bare minimum required to craft a scene. Giving the necessary facts while leaving out the context. “Who is he?” I asked. There were other possibilities. A man asking for directions. Someone who liked what he saw and followed me home.

“Name’s Sean Coleman. His license says he’s from Kentucky. We’re still in the process of tracking down his next of kin, so we need to keep this between us for the moment.”

The porch light flickered in my peripheral vision, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“What?” I said, though I wasn’t sure if any noise escaped at all. My throat felt dry, and the air turned cold and empty.

The detective’s eyes latched on to mine.

“His name,” I said. “What did you say?” I had to make sure I was hearing it right. That I was exactly where I thought I was, in the present. That the dream or the nightmare wasn’t rising up and overlapping.

“Sean Coleman. Fifty-two years old. You know the name?”

My ears started ringing. It was a name forever tied to mine. In every article, every news story. Too common a name to turn up on its own in a search, but add Sean Coleman and Arden Maynor, and there he would be. His hand reaching into the grate. Circling my wrist. I’d heard the story a thousand times.

His photo beside mine in the news broadcast. The hero, looking off to the side. He looked so young then.

The moment I’d been found was played over and over again. That woman reporter, interviewing my mother as the news came in.

In that moment, she was every mother, and I was every child. It aired again on the five-year anniversary in every special broadcast, and again on the ten-year. It played to emotions; it was the video that people remembered the most.

But there was another clip, one that hadn’t endured quite as long. It was a little grainy, a little disorganized; you couldn’t see our faces. But it was the moment that counted.

Sean Coleman, the man who had found me.

Bennett was there now, standing just inside the living room, listening.

Four walls closing in, and nowhere to go, no way to escape.

The past had found me. It was here. It was time.

“Yes,” I said. “I know the name.”

TRANSCRIPT OF LIVE REPORT—WTKY CHANNEL 3

OCTOBER 19, 2000, 7:43 P.M.

DON MULLER: Welcome to the viewers who are just tuning in. We’ve got Emma Lyons on the scene, and what you’re about to see is some pretty dramatic imagery. Emma, can you tell us what we’re looking at?

EMMA LYONS: Don, right now we’re just beyond the perimeter set up by the rescue operation. We’ve got a pretty clear shot through the trees to that clearing, where the activity is happening. Fred, if you zoom in there . . . Don, let me know if you can see that all right? Can you see the man near the ground?

DM: Yes, we can see him.

EL: The man in the green shirt, with his back to us—he’s the one, we believe, who found Arden Maynor. Look closely. Over his shoulder, there’s a hand holding on to the fabric of his shirt. That, we believe, is the hand of six-year-old Arden Maynor, trapped under the grate. Her hand is gripping the back of his shirt. She’s alive. And not only that—it seems she’s conscious.

DM: Incredible. Absolutely incredible.

EL: I almost can’t believe it myself, Don. It’s miraculous.

DM: What’s the scene like there, Emma?

EL: You can absolutely feel the excitement in the air. There’s an energy in the crowd. But they still have to find a way to get her out.

DM: Can you fill us in a little on anything you’ve heard about the ongoing rescue operation?

EL: Of course. They’re being very careful. They don’t want to do anything to disturb her. The lid to the drainage pipe there is sealed pretty good. We hear the man who found her fastened a belt around her to hold her close. They’re reinforcing those safety measures right now, so that she remains safe, first of all. They’re going to have to stay like this for a while, until they figure it out—the best way forward. This access point is actually not one that’s mapped on the city system, but something older, from the original system, back when this area was a mining community. So there’s a bit of confusion over how best to reach her. They’re about to begin drilling through the surrounding earth, to see what they’re dealing with.

DM: Do they know who it is, Emma? The man who’s holding her up?

EL: We haven’t gotten official word, but several of the local folks we’ve been interviewing tell us he’s from the adjoining town. A thirty-two-year-old by the name of Sean Coleman.

CHAPTER 12

Saturday, 5 p.m.

THERE WAS A VISCERAL reaction to speaking about the past. Something I’d long gone out of the way to contain. A shaking that started in my fingers, a tremor that worked its way through my body, though no one seemed to notice but me. The precursor to panic; something that seized my mind and body alike. This biological desire to keep the past contained, in a different part of the world—a different person, with a different name.

I’d thought maybe the detective was too young to remember. That enough time had passed. It was our parents’ generation that really experienced the case so immediately, who felt that terror and relief deep in their bones. So I started at the beginning. Assuming she knew nothing.

“I was born Arden Olivia Maynor,” I said. “There was a terrible accident when I was little. I was lost, trapped, for days. And it felt like the entire country was watching my rescue. I changed my name before college, to escape the media attention. It was just . . . so much.”

As soon as I said that name, I could see recognition settling in, sharp and surprising.

“The girl who was swept away in a storm,” Detective Rigby said, something close to awe in her voice. “The girl who held on to a grate for three days.” She didn’t mention the sleepwalking, but she must’ve known it. That fact must’ve been there, lodged somewhere in the back of her mind.

“Well, no. Not exactly,” I said. That was the story my mother seemed to want to believe—something beyond miraculous. The story, hyperbolized in memoriam. “But yes, I was swept away in the flash flood and trapped somewhere in the pipes for three days before making my way to that grate. I was found clinging to it, three days later. Sean Coleman. He was the man who found me. That’s his name.”

The detective didn’t blink, didn’t even seem to be breathing, when I told her what the name Sean Coleman meant to me. I could sense everything shifting as I spoke. The investigation resettling from Rick’s house to right here.

Because it had to be about me.

He had to be heading for my property, my house.

Sean Coleman had to be coming here.

Or he was watching. At least that much was clear.

Detective Rigby said she’d be back, but I stood as she walked toward the door, trying desperately to convey something—twenty years’ worth of meaning—into a pointless request. “Is there any way—” I began.

She turned at the door, her mind already halfway across the yard, or on the phone, to the next person she would tell. A chain that had just kicked off, and here I was attempting to ask her if there was any way to stop it. To leave me to my life, when the man who saved me was dead. I knew it wasn’t fair. And yet I asked. “What if none of this is relevant?”