I walked back to my car and looped around the outside of town, following the Internet’s directions on where to park, where to walk. It was less marked but functioned as a path all the same.

I’d seen Emma Lyons do it. All the reporters, in a bustle of activity, set up with their camera gear.

Now there was nothing but crickets and birds periodically calling in the late afternoon, the wind moving through the trees, the occasional animal scurrying through the bushes.

This was the same path Sean Coleman must’ve been following the night he found me, heading back to his car. In that rare interview he’d given, he said he’d parked outside the town center and was making his way back from the search when he saw my hand.

I knew it as soon as I was upon it. The clearing with the grate in the middle. Tall weeds growing up and over where the old plaque must still be, beside the grate. I stood in the spot where Emma Lyons once stood, pointing out the activity in the center. Where she could see Sean Coleman holding on to me. My arm, proof of life.

During the rescue, they ended up coming at me from the side, to keep the equipment away from my face. The lid was secured and welded shut, and no one wanted to drill next to my head. They dug down beside it instead, then drilled through the concrete tubing, until they could remove me that way.

I walked to the clearing, once blocked off by the perimeter to hold back the media and onlookers.

Twenty years later, and both the grate and the hole they’d dug were resecured.

I used my sneaker to brush aside the tall weeds, a layer of dirt dulling the words of the plaque:

In honor of the good people of Widow Hills

To commemorate the rescue of Arden Maynor

I stepped closer, peering into the grate. Could hear a steady drip of water, something faintly flowing in the distance. Close enough now to feel a whoosh of chilled air, hear a hollow echo. I closed my eyes, like I could feel the precursor to panic settling in.

It was a feeling like disorientation, like staring into that empty box—like I was looking for something, desperately, that did not exist.

I knelt down, closed my hands around the grates, felt the cold biting into my palms. Staring down, I saw only darkness. I shone my phone light into the abyss so I could see the bottom. The sloped walls and the stagnant water. The ledge. The input pipe from another section. I imagined myself crawling, or forced through, emerging with a sudden burst of air. Rising up with the water and reaching out my hand.

I pressed my face closer to the grates, trying to see; breathing it in, in all its horror.

I closed my eyes, straining to remember, but there was only the emptiness. A black hole in place of a memory—but something pulling me closer, closer.

I opened my eyes to darkness—a shadow, like a cloud had moved across the sun.

All the hairs rising on the back of my neck, across my arms, my hands tightening on the grate. Grass crunching behind me.

“Don’t be scared.” The deep timbre of his voice, so calm and assured.

I turned slowly, making sure to stand at the same time. To reach my hand into my pocket and grip my keys.

“Are you wondering how you got in there?” he asked. He wore jeans and that bomber jacket, sunglasses on top of his head so I could see his eyes, narrowed, searching.

“What are you doing here?” Though it was obvious. How he’d followed me, found me. He’d been stalking me.

And now he had me, all alone.

Nathan stepped carefully, leaves crunching beneath his feet. “I’m trying to figure out how much you really know. I read that article that called you a gifted liar.”

“I don’t remember anything,” I said, stepping back. Phone in my back pocket; keys in my grip. Counting my exits: path to the car or run deeper into the woods—

“How could you not remember? You were six, almost seven. Of course you’d remember. It was this huge thing. How could you not?”

“Trauma,” I said, repeating what others had said after. How the mind dissociates, goes to its most primitive form, where the only goal is survival. I felt the keys in my grip, biting into my fist.

“I was going to tell you,” he said. “That I knew who you were. But you confessed it first, and I didn’t know what to do. I went about it all wrong, I can see that now. You saw the articles in my luggage, didn’t you. And you freaked. I get it.” Like he was forgiving me, instead of the other way around, when he’d been stalking me for years.

I shifted in tiny steps, so as not to make him spook. “I don’t care,” I said, even though that wasn’t true. But all I knew right then was the thing I’d always known, that singular focus: survival.

Sean Coleman was dead. Elyse was dead. And this man, he was big enough to do it.

“You should care,” he said. “There are so many holes in that story, it’s ridiculous. And nobody else seems to notice. The 911 calls don’t add up. The sleepwalking doesn’t add up. The shoes.”

He was unhinged—ten years, building up. Ten years, about to boil over.

I put my hand out, to stop him, to slow him down. I’d heard it all from Emma Lyons. “You’re seeing what you want to see, Nathan.” Trying to reason him back with me. To see the marvel of it all: that there was a literal hole in the earth here—this spot that I’d been found inside. It was miraculous, and he wanted it to be something else. “No one else backs up these claims.”

His eyes darkened as if he didn’t like the conclusion. Then the side of his mouth quirked. “Well, that’s not true at all,” he said.

I had shifted another step closer to the way I’d come, but now I froze. The desire for the truth. For my own past, for who I was—“What?” The word so quiet, I might not have spoken it at all.

“The media brushed it off, but you know who didn’t?” He paused, making me wait. “Your mother.”

I stepped back like he’d moved closer, which he hadn’t. “You knew my mother?”

“Not in so many words. But I wrote to her, told her what I knew, told her the evidence I had. She thought I was my father, the only other person who would know the truth, right? I didn’t need him to confirm it when your mother reacted the way she did.” I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know. But he took a step closer, and there was no escaping it now. “She thought I was Sean, and she asked me how much it would take to keep me silent, make it all go away. And then she gave it.”

“You? You were blackmailing us?” Those letters that had been returned to sender—he’d been threatening my mother, warning her.

“Blackmail?” he spat. “Is that what you call it? She’s a liar. That money did not belong to her. To either of you.”

Everything shifted, my understanding of the past; my understanding of just how far he’d go. This was the truth, then: that Nathan Coleman had been blackmailing my mother. That our money had disappeared, not to her addiction but to him. He had taken it from us—everything she’d made from our story. She’d had to sell everything to make him stop.

“You don’t know what it was like to be so close to a story, to see you on the other side of it, getting everything. That should’ve been ours, too. If my father would seize a fucking opportunity, do one of those talk shows, something, anything. If he would just tell his story, it wouldn’t have come to that. But at the ten-year anniversary, after all that new press? Your mother sure did pay up.” He licked his lips. “Are you sure you don’t remember?”