I remained standing but took a sandwich, just to have something to do with my hands. “You heard about Sean Coleman,” I said. “You saw the article?”

She nodded, standing on the other side of the table, eyes flicking periodically to the front windows. “In your email, you mentioned . . . Has his son been in contact?” she asked.

“You could say that. I think . . . I think he’s obsessed. With what happened.” I swallowed. “Or with me. I found this stack of papers he had with him. He’s been keeping everything about the case. Everything from twenty years ago.” I was trying to figure out why he’d homed in on certain details. “He had transcripts from the 911 calls, even. I don’t know why.”

She took a sip of her drink, ice rattling in the crystal glass. “He came to me,” she said. “Around the ten-year anniversary.”

“God, but I was just in high school . . . he was—”

“Nineteen,” she said, nodding. “He was nineteen, and very self-righteous, and hyper-focused. I only agreed to talk to him because of his father. Because I was hoping to have you all on for a special together—your mom, Sean Coleman, you. A happy reunion.”

But that had never happened. I’d refused to participate, though my mom had practically demanded it. Sean hadn’t done any interviews, either, though.

“So Nathan Coleman meets with me, and he says he has a big story. That his father said something once when he was drunk. Apparently, Nathan had asked him about it, about why he didn’t take more interviews.” She looked away. “According to Nathan, his father claimed he’d walked that same route every day of the search, and you weren’t there. Said he’d even looked inside once.”

I froze, unable to move. “You didn’t think that was important?” I asked.

“No, I mean no one knows what happened underground. I know your mother thought you were there all along, waiting to be found, but that was highly unlikely. More likely, you were trapped underground somewhere else and were brought to a new location, back to the surface as the waters rose. The pipes were all interconnected. We were never gonna know for sure. All his comment would do was encourage the conspiracy theories.”

“What conspiracy theories?”

She laughed, then stopped. “Every story has the deniers, the skeptics. The conspiracy believers. There are dark corners of the Internet that thrive on them. You’re lucky you were rescued before a lot of those sites proliferated.” My mother had stressed the importance of staying offline back then. But I remembered Detective Rigby saying she understood why I had changed my name. I wondered what she had been able to find from twenty years earlier—or closer, from a decade ago.

“Truly, it doesn’t matter,” Emma continued. “You were lost, and then you were found, and he was a hero.”

“And it made your career?”

“Well. It made all of us, wouldn’t you say?”

My house, my education. But I had paid for it, hadn’t I? In pieces of myself fed to others?

She glanced out the window again, took a deeper drink, seemed to be fighting off a chill. “Anyway, I did follow up. He would’ve gone to someone else if I’d blown him off. But when I contacted Sean Coleman directly, he denied it. Said it wasn’t true. Either way, the story was dead.” She shrugged. “Listen, Arden, Olivia, there’s always little things that don’t make sense. And some people get so caught up in those details, looking for a story, that it’s impossible to see anything else. I wonder if that’s what set Nathan off. He said he had a big story. But all he had was a bunch of little things, none of them corroborated, none of them amounting to anything. He couldn’t see anything beyond it. And if he’s talking to you now, it’s just been stewing for the last ten years.” She paused. “And that’s never a good situation.”

For a moment, I wondered how he could be caught up on something from ten years earlier, from back when he was nineteen. Except I was still trying to untangle myself from a story that had lasted two decades.

But Emma implied that there was more to it than just the fact that I hadn’t been in the same spot in the days before I was found. “What things? What other little things did he have?” I asked.

“Oh, he wanted to know why you were wearing shoes if you were sleepwalking. But we’d already talked to the doctors, who explained that people often managed to do normal tasks like getting dressed, putting on shoes, even driving to work.” She raised a finger, keeping track of each point before moving on to the next. “He said your mother claimed she had already called for you outside during her 911 call, but the neighbor’s call of her screaming came in after.” She rolled her eyes. “But so what? She’d probably screamed for you before, then called 911, then gone back out.”

I remembered that transcript in Nathan’s pile. Stuart Goss saying he was outside getting ready for work when he heard my mother.

“Maybe someone should just ask Stuart Goss,” I said. Clear this whole thing up. I remembered him vaguely, the grizzled neighbor, that old car in his yard. He had a big dog that was always barking.

“Mr. Goss passed away about . . . two years after the rescue, I think. Lung cancer.”

“Oh,” I said. But also, she had checked. All these little things she mentioned, she had followed up. They had, indeed, caused her to wonder.

“Look, the point is, nothing could be corroborated. It was a dead end. There’s no story in any of it. I assure you, we did our due diligence. No one wants to get caught reporting a lie.”

“But it’s a lot. A lot of little things.”

“Yes, but you can find anything if you look hard enough. You can see anything if you want to. I don’t think he’d believe the truth if we showed him a live video at this point.”

Though I hadn’t touched the sandwich, I fidgeted with the glass plate, spinning it on the surface. I almost didn’t ask, but I’d come all this way. “But what do you think?” I asked.

Emma Lyons turned to the cabinet alongside the wall, refilled her drink from a separate crystal container. Like she needed to steel herself for the truth. “Well,” she said, recapping the drink, “it doesn’t matter what I think, Arden. Sorry, Olivia.”

“Please. It will stay between us.”

She took a deep breath and a long drink before speaking. “There was only one thing that really bugged me, but we couldn’t air it even if we wanted to. Protected by your medical privacy. It’s what one of the doctors said . . . I was interviewing him at a bar, my own poor judgment, and his, but I wanted something we could use. Not a medical fact but a quote—about how strong you were, how you’d defied the odds. We wanted general statistics, nothing that violated your privacy.”

“And?”

“And,” she said, drawing out the word. “He said you weren’t dehydrated enough. But so what? You were inside a storm drain. It rained. Presumably, you could drink—though I’d imagine it was not the type of water one should be drinking.”

She started tapping her nails against the glass, the sound echoing through the room.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Well, no.” She lowered her voice, eyes to the window again, like a nervous tic. “He said that the injury was weird.” She waved one hand through the air, like she had to show how trivial such a thing might be. How she didn’t quite believe it herself. “I told him, look, she was stuck in a pipe. You were swept away. Surely things could get weird, the angle you’d be stuck at. Things like that. No one knows exactly what happened while you were down there, how far you traveled. But this is the one thing that sometimes niggles at me around each anniversary. I don’t know how to explain it, exactly, other than a sort of sixth sense that develops when you’re on to a story and you get the feeling that—here, there’s something here.”