My heart was racing before I got there, even though I couldn’t explain why.

And then I saw her empty bed. And I knew for sure. It was my worst nightmare.

People often ask me if I believed that Arden would be found alive, especially as one day turned to two, and two days turned to three. The answer is always yes, and that’s the truth. Because there were other things I knew about my daughter besides the fact that she was missing:

I knew she was a fighter. She came into this world kicking and screaming. I swear she could be heard clear across the county the day she was born.

I knew she wouldn’t go out of this world without a fight, either.

CHAPTER 16

Monday, 8 a.m.

I WAS RELIEVED TO WAKE and find my room exactly as I’d left it. Ladder tucked away in the closet, hook and eye securely latched, phone facedown beside me. I’d even locked the window, just to add a few extra steps. I hadn’t even known how to lock it until last night, when I ran my fingers along the border, feeling for the latch. The window was unreachable from the ground outside, anyway.

Elyse still hadn’t contacted me, and I couldn’t help but swing by her apartment once more on the way in to work. It stung that she was avoiding me—more than I thought it would, given my history. But whatever had happened between her and Bennett was partly my fault. I’d thought, if I could just talk to her, I could convince her to come back.

It took a little longer to get inside the apartment building this time; apparently, I’d missed the morning rush, both in and out.

This time it was her neighbor across the way who held the door. He didn’t seem to recognize me in his rush, barreling through the doorway in his slacks and button-down.

“Hey, excuse me, have you seen Elyse?”

He did a double take, then leaned against the door as he slid me into context. “She moved out.”

My stomach dropped. “Are you sure?”

He shrugged. “Her apartment’s vacant. That’s all I know. Maybe the lady next door, in 121—Erin, I think?—she might know more. They hung out a lot. I think they worked at the hospital together. She might already be gone for the day, though. We all usually leave around the same time.” He checked his watch, then let the door swing shut behind him.

I couldn’t think of any Erin I knew who worked with us, but if she wasn’t in our department, that wasn’t saying much.

I walked down the hall to Elyse’s apartment. Even the wreath and the doormat were gone. I knocked once just in case, pressed down on the handle, but it was locked.

A door clicked open somewhere down the hall, then closed again. Apartment 121, I thought, but no one was out in the hall. Maybe just a trick of the acoustics, and it was a door around the corner, out of sight.

But I paused in front of apartment 121 on my way out. The doorway was bare, with no personal touches. I knocked twice and swore I could hear movement inside. A presence on the other side of the door. A shadow at the peephole, looking out.

“Hi, I’m looking for Elyse?” I said, in case anyone was there.

But if they were, they didn’t move again. I started to doubt myself, what I’d heard, what I’d felt.

I remembered suddenly how spooked Elyse had been at my house—looking out the window, the fear transferring to her by proximity. And Nathan, asking if I felt safe there. Even he could sense the danger radiating from my place. Could I really blame her for leaving? Wouldn’t I have done the same if I’d had some other place I considered home?

———

EVERYONE TRIED TO ACT normal when I arrived at the hospital. Faces that were either too friendly, or people who averted their gaze entirely, pretending to be absorbed in their phones.

I had found a dead body outside my house, and everyone knew it. Everyone knew I’d been brought in with the detective. I could only imagine the type of gossip swirling through the back channels, whispered between shifts in the lounge.

I stopped in the cafeteria for breakfast and coffee, which wasn’t my normal routine. But I needed the caffeine to focus; I felt slow, a step behind.

This early in the day, there was just a scattering of people around the tables. But I felt their eyes on me, their voices falling to whispers. On my way out of the cafeteria, I passed a nurse from the ER. She did a stutter step in the hall, called out a too-loud “Good morning!” as I passed. As if surprised to see me back at work.

Or maybe I was just projecting. Maybe she didn’t know me at all, was surprised to see anyone in her path. Maybe I was just vaguely familiar to her, as she was to me.

I took the back stairwell again, my steps echoing in the silence. The distance between the click of one door latching and the other opening on the third floor was something I could count in my head. Thirty-two steps. Half a minute.

Inside my wing, the hall was strangely empty. Since I’d stopped for breakfast, I wasn’t as early as I’d been on Friday, before the shift began. By now, the morning rounds were usually in full swing, and the administrative meetings were getting started.

Bennett was typically off on Mondays, but I walked by the nurses’ lounge, just in case his schedule had shifted to accommodate the past weekend. The only person inside was the woman with auburn hair, on her phone again. Same as last week, when I’d backed into the medicine room.

I was overcome with a vague sense of déjà vu. I knew the nurses who worked up here best. Though everyone could use the lounge, they were the ones who’d usually be resting on the couch.

A door opened behind me, a man in scrubs leaving the medicine room. He saw me standing there and smiled. “Morning,” he said. But he took a minute turning the lock to the medicine room behind him, even as I walked away.

My stomach churned, imagining the stories. It was the same feeling I had gotten ten years earlier, people watching and talking, before the panic attack that I didn’t know was a panic attack. The slow buildup, and the rapid unraveling, before I recognized it for what it was and could put a name to the physical reaction.

Would it escalate, as it had back then? The comments? The attention? Until I found myself trapped—at the mercy of something else beyond my control?

Ten years earlier, everything had boiled over with an incident in the gym locker room.

Their voices still echoed a decade later.

Living off other people’s hard-earned money—

My parents said they donated, probably paid for your house—

A group of girls scattered around me. One in particular standing between me and the exit of the gym locker room, the walls narrowing as the voices grew. Until I had to move. Had to get out.

The school counselor attributed the incident to PTSD, but it didn’t change the reaction. I was sent home for a week. I was just lucky it hadn’t made it on the news.

But it was a good story. Describe her in three words: angry, unpredictable, dangerous.

My mother stressed the need to stay offline, to keep random people on the Internet from contacting me on social media, and private messages, and lesser-known chat rooms. I had quickly learned never to search for my own name. But I still saw it, heard about it. Kids bartered information, discovered the power of it. At that age, it was what we had.

Ten years later, we hadn’t much changed. We all just had more access to the truth and the lies.