“Is everything okay?” he asks, shaking off the morning voice, and I imagine him sitting up in bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. There’s a noise in the background, and I picture a woman beside him, a girlfriend maybe, rolling away, drawing a sheet over her head to lessen the sound of his voice.
On the other side of the curtains, the night is black. It’s sometime after two, maybe three, in the morning. The sun won’t rise for hours.
“We know where Reese is.”
“Where?” he asks, his voice suddenly more alert. I tell him, texting him a screenshot of the Snap Map from Wyatt’s phone.
On the other end of the line, Detective Evans is quiet at first; he doesn’t have the same reaction as me.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” I ask, because of his silence.
“How much do you know about Snapchat, Mrs. Gray?”
“Not much. Almost nothing.”
“These maps are not always reliable. They’re only as good as the last time a person logged in to the site. That means Reese might have been there last night, but it doesn’t mean she’s still here now. And we have no way of knowing if Reese logged in to the account herself or if someone else logged in to it.”
“You’re not going to look for her?” I ask, exasperated, hearing him sigh through the phone, and though my heart sinks, it doesn’t matter because I’ve already decided that even if he isn’t, I still am.
But he is. He says that he is going to look for her, and I imagine him sweeping the covers from his body, swinging his feet over the side of the bed, standing up.
“I’ll meet you there,” I tell him, already reaching for a pair of jeans that lie folded on the top of my closed suitcase.
But he says, “No, Mrs. Gray,” his voice firm, resolute. “You can’t do that. I need you to stay there, at the cottage. It’s dark outside. You don’t know the area like we do.”
“But—” I try to object. He stops me before the words can get out.
“You need to take care of the other kids,” he says, as Mae whimpers, crying out for Emily in her sleep.
I know Detective Evans is right. Still, I hate the idea of sitting idly by while the police search for Reese. But this part of Wisconsin that we’re in is made up of vast forests with millions of acres of trees and thousands of lakes and swamps. It’s the type of place where people can get easily lost or disappear in.
“I can’t have anything bad happening to you too,” he says, promising to call with news.
I come to early in the morning, woken by a sound. I don’t know where I am at first. I only know that this isn’t my bed and this isn’t my room. Before I ever open my eyes, I can tell that something is off. It feels all wrong to me. There are fewer pillows on the bed than I’m used to, and my downy duvet has been reduced to a quilt that lies like deadweight, leveling me in bed.
And then reality crushes and drives over me and I remember: the little lakeside cottage in the woods.
Emily and Nolan dead.
I inhale a sharp drag of air, the memory of it settling in my stomach like rocks. This can’t be real. This can’t be happening. For one split second, I can almost tell myself it was a dream, a nightmare, but then, a second later it solidifies, becoming concrete, and I know.
It is real. It happened.
They’re dead.
I blink open my eyes, which are all but swollen shut. With effort, I sit up in bed, my phone sliding off my chest because I must have somehow drifted off to sleep, waiting for Detective Evans to call, exhaustion pulling me under against my will.
The sound, I realize, is my phone.
Desperately I grab for it, turning it to face me, Detective Evans’s name splayed on the screen.
“What happened?” I ask. “Was she there, Detective? Did you find Reese?”
After a failed attempt to find her themselves overnight, the police arrange a ground search for Reese, asking the community for volunteers to help look in the location where she was last seen on Snapchat. I decide to go while Elliott stays behind with the kids. He wants to go too, but we can’t take the kids with us and we can’t leave them alone. It’s not safe for them.
Before I leave, Elliott follows me to the window, standing behind me. I peel the curtain back to gaze out, beyond the police officer who’s still parked in his car on the driveway. Outside, it’s bright and calm, a glitch in the matrix. The weather should be stormy, the lake raging, the wind wild and rushing through the trees. Instead, there are more boaters and fishermen on the lake than I’m used to. They sit along our shoreline, enjoying the peaceful view.
“Why don’t you just let the police and volunteers look? Why do you need to go?” Elliott asks.
