Then I remembered that Hazel changed her handle every few weeks so that colleges couldn’t stalk her. Her friends did it too. “Finstas,” she had told me.
I turned to my own DMs to find Hazel’s profile. She and I hadn’t exchanged a lot of messages over the years, but she frequently replied to my stories. The last one was from a month ago. A heart-eye emoji. I hadn’t responded. Her handle was there though:@Hazelnut06.
My stomach lurched, remembering the childhood nickname Will had given her years ago. I clicked the profile. The bio was clean and simple.
Hazel. 17. SRHS. Unapologetic Horse Girl, followed by the horse and sun emojis.
Her profile picture was of half her face, her long hair braided down her back. I clicked her most recent post. It was dated last Friday. A picture of her and another girl sitting on the bleachers at the high school captionedHappy Birthday Kayleigh! Love you girlie.
I kept scrolling. There were pictures of her at the beach, with a gaggle of girls in brightly colored bikinis and subs from Publix. A picture from a sleepover. A selfie. She looked pretty. In one of her posing with her driver’s license, her fingers covered the personal information.Smart girl.
It was a normal teenage girl’s Instagram. Compared to the slutty pictures and whiny Tumblr quotes I had posted when I was her age, this was wholesome. After several scrolls up and down the page, I got the measure of who she hung around with. I remembered the girl Kayleigh from when she was little. I recognized another girl too, the younger sister of someone I hadgraduated with. There was also a tall boy who made frequent appearances in photos whose name I had deduced was Jaxxon.Classic Florida parents. When I clicked through these kids’ profiles, I was surprised to see that a couple of them followed me. The ones with public accounts had already posted about Hazel, selfies with captions begging for help finding their friend. The cynical part of me wondered how much they were enjoying the attention.
Overwhelmingly the most prominent feature on Hazel’s Instagram was the McCullough Farm: scenery at the ranch, the horses in their stables, Hazel riding or posing in their merch.
Hazel had always been obsessed with horses. A childhood passion that hadn’t faded with time. When she was younger, everything she owned had a horse on it, from her clothes to her bedspread. She didn’t have a teddy bear; she had a stuffed pony. There’d even been talk of her getting her own horse. We had the land for it, but then our family was in such shambles by the time she was old enough to start riding, not to mention in financial ruin from Will’s legal bills, that it was not an option. The solution was the McCulloughs’. Owned by a kind and quiet British couple, the farm was just a few minutes away from the house and had several horses, along with other animals. From the moment Hazel was old enough to go there alone, she spent every free minute helping with farm work in exchange for lessons and riding time.
I scrolled back up the page, looking at a post from five days ago showing Hazel posing in the stables. It was captionedWhere else would I be?
Where else, indeed. The McCulloughs’ farm was over thirty acres, with a small office building, three different stables, multiple trailers, and a heavily wooded border.
I would start there first thing in the morning.
6
I’d forgotten how oppressively hot Florida could be. Even in the spring. After living almost my entire life in this godforsaken state, I would have thought I’d be used to it, but seven years in the Northeast had made me forget.
I’d taken a sleeping pill after I left Hazel’s room the night before, committed to getting some rest so I could sync up with my family in the morning before heading to McCullough Farm. But I’d forgotten to set an alarm and woken up at 9 a.m. to a text from Tommy, delivered an hour before.
Hey Rose, we’ve headed out to search. Touch base later?
The house was silent, with no other texts from anyone else telling me where they’d gone. It instantly enraged me. Why hadn’t they woken me up? Shouldn’t we all be together? I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was purposefully being left out, like an inconvenient afterthought.
I decided not to bother trying to deduce my family’s motivations. I dressed quickly and drove my rented SUV toward the farm. It wasn’t far from the house. A five-minute car ride that Hazel made three times a week on her bike. The familiar wooden sign depicting a large horse and the name of the farm was still situated at the end of their long drive. I followed the curved road until it spit me out in the dirt parking lot. There was an administration building at the edge of the estate that I had intended to start with, but as I parked, I could see a familiar figure standing in the doorway of the nearest stables. His faded tan overalls and orange T-shirt were unmistakable. Mr. McCulloughwas raking horse shit up from the floor as I approached. The smell was awful and made me want to cover my nose with my sleeve, but I refrained. Mr. McCullough heard my footsteps and cocked an eyebrow upward as I walked into the stable.
“Is that you, Rosie?” he asked, his voice echoing across the empty space.
I nodded and didn’t correct him, even though no one outside of my father or Tommy called me Rosie anymore. The last time I’d seen Mr. McCullough, I was a teenager, angry and desperate to spit fire at anyone who came near me. But he and his wife were some of the few people in this town who’d always had our family’s back. They had gone above and beyond, becoming surrogate grandparents to Hazel. A safe place for her to escape to.
I hadn’t seen them since the book came out. Like a lot of people I’d expected to be supportive, they hadn’t been.
“Hi, Mr. McCullough,” I said cautiously. “How are you?”
He put down his rake, resting it against one of the stable walls and beside a black horse that was neighing softly. I shuddered. I knew Hazel adored them, but I found horses to be scary fucking creatures.
“’Bout as good as you, I expect,” Mr. McCullough said grimly, reaching out a hand and placing it kindly on my shoulder. The skin around his eyes was wrinkled. “Any news yet?”
Relief swept through me at finding an ally. I shook my head. “No.” Not that I would know if there was, I thought bitterly.
He sighed. “That’s a real shame. We care deeply about your sister, you know.”
“I know. She really likes it here,” I replied genuinely. That was one thing I knew even without the Instagram stalking.
“Are you and Tommy holding up okay?” Mr. McCullough asked.
I tried to swallow the bitterness I was feeling toward my family and shook my head. “Not really.”
“Well, the missus and I are here to help in any way we can,” Mr. McCullough said. “We love your sister, and she talks about you all the time. Anything you need right now, any help we can give, let us know.”
