10:03 A.M.

Hey, listen, I heard what happened with work. Really shitty, seriously. If you need a place to crash and hide out from all this, I’m here. I mean it. I’ve been a crappy friend, Liv. I was upset you never told me. But I get it. I really do, and I don’t care what they’re saying. Okay? Call me back so I know you’re okay either way. I’m at work, but I’ve got my phone on me. I know. Don’t tell.

MACKENZIE SHAW

10:45 A.M.

Hi, Olivia, Mackenzie Shaw returning your call. Sorry, just got your message. This is my cell, please call back as soon as possible.

CALVIN ROYCE

10:59 A.M.

Olivia, this is Cal Royce. You missed our appointment today. I had a call from a detective and she’s coming in later. Please get back to me.

NATHAN COLEMAN

11:23 A.M.

I know you saw. I know you know. Let me explain. It’s not what you think.

CHAPTER 24

Thursday, 4:30 p.m.

THE SIGN FOR WIDOW Hills came up abruptly, before I was ready for it—so unassuming at the edge of the road, blending in with the woods.

I had to drive another mile, the road slanting upward into a crest, before I saw them: the peaks of the three mountains in the distance, huddling together in a cloud of gray mist.

My stomach dropped like I was at the top of a ride, about to tumble over. The anticipation before the fall; the fear before the scream.

As the roads started veering off from the main thoroughfare, I tried to orient myself. Tried to see the little-girl version of me. But it was all imagination and conjecture. There was nothing instinctive about the sloping road into town. I hadn’t been here since I was seven, and nothing looked familiar.

It had been too long, even, to feel a vague familiarity with the town itself. Even the mountains themselves in the distance, the very landmark that gave Widow Hills its name, I didn’t know whether I remembered it myself or if I was just remembering a photo, a story.

I remembered newspaper photos and interviews replayed. I remembered that pale yellow house with the gingerbread trim, a photograph of my mother in front of it. The humidity of the hallway; the screen door slamming shut.

More than this place, I remembered the after.

The hook-and-eye latch; the medicine; the hot chocolate. The doctors and my mother beside the bed. I remember the operations, the pain, the exercises. The looks.

Before, there was darkness.

Before, there were only the stories—the things people told me and the things I’d read. Sometimes I felt I was nothing more than a character brought to life by my mother’s book. A girl who came into this world kicking and screaming. A girl whose mother knew, before her eyes had even shot open, that her daughter was gone. A girl whose mother believed she would survive it.

She had called us both survivors.

As I turned onto the street where I’d once lived, I wondered—would I remember when I saw it? Was it possible to unearth a memory from twenty years earlier, to find out what had been worth killing for decades later?

All the documents Nathan Coleman had been accruing on me flashed in my mind. The interviews, the 911 calls, the excerpts from my mother’s book that he found relevant for some reason. Like he’d spent so much time dedicated to my life, he’d seen something emerging from the background.

But those details existed in a vacuum. I needed to see it. See, most important, whether I could drag my own memories back to the surface.

There was nothing to mark the spot as a tourist attraction on a map, though I knew it. On the Internet, you could get a mapped path to the site of Arden’s disappearance and the location of her rescue. For a while after the rescue, I’d heard there were even tours—the commercialization of a trauma.

Widow Hills had owned its role. Found the help they needed, rescued their own. The town was a survivor, too. It had survived the media attention and then the aftermath, when they all packed up and left. The attention shifting elsewhere as everyone scrambled for relevance.

I would not have been able to find my old house on my own, without the GPS. I barely even recognized it. Sometime in the passing years, the ranch-style house had been repainted a light gray. The grass was dead. I could hear the screen door banging shut in my memory, though there didn’t seem to be one attached to the entrance anymore.

Twenty years, and I guess I should’ve been grateful the house was standing at all. I idled my car at the curb; there were no houses across the street, just scattered trees giving way to forest. We were on the outskirts of town. The houses on either side had no cars parked in the driveways. Someone peered out a window just as I was looking, and I kept moving toward the end of the street—the direction I’d headed that night in my sleep.

I parked my car out of sight of the homes, where the road swerved to the left. This was where I’d been swept away. Off the road, down the embankment, into the wooded area. The trees were sporadic here, not yet the dense forest of the distance. A ditch was cut into the wooded area just off the road. This was where it had happened. The water rising, and rushing, knocking me off my feet. Flowing downstream, over the grass and roots and dirt.

I’d seen the footage, the reporters walking the audience through the sequence of events, the play-by-play that had led to my disappearance.

There was a faint path that marked the way to the drainage pipe. Downtrodden by the events leading up to my rescue twenty years ago. Maintained by the curious following the trail. When I arrived at the access point, the grate was sealed up. There was nothing to mark what had once happened here—this was not where I had been found but where I’d been lost. And yet this was the site most visited. It was more iconic, the image shown over and over beside the photo of my green sneaker, stuck in the edge of the torn-away grate.

I imagined those moments of hope; hoping it held, before my foot gave way, leaving the shoe behind.

I must’ve been awake. The memory buried while I’d dissociated. While I’d been swept into the pipes—just small enough—lost to the darkness. The terrible horror of it.

On the news, before I was found, reporters had traced the paths I might’ve taken with the map of the pipe system up on the screen. Where I might’ve gotten air. How I might’ve moved from section to section.

The problem with the pipe system map, I knew from both the articles and my mother’s book, was that it was incomplete. This town had been an old mining area, and a new public works system had been laid on top of a less-well-understood drainage system from the past. There were more access points than the city had record of. Of course, they checked the access points they knew of, over the first couple of days, but I hadn’t been found at any of those.

After, they said I must’ve found footholds. I must’ve been buoyed by water collecting in a stagnant section. I must’ve found a resting spot and slept at some point.

I must’ve had the largest dose of luck by my side.

I must’ve been driven and capable and determined and brave.

I must’ve been a miracle.

So many things had to line up for me to survive, skirting the realm of believability. But that was what made the story.

But standing here now, I felt nothing.

The spot where I was found was closer to the river, in an unmarked access point that predated the current system. That’s where my mother believed I’d held on for days, waiting to be found, until Sean Coleman reached out and grabbed my wrist. There, I hoped, was the place I might actually remember something.