Page 7 of My Girl to Take

I step back, planning to say something appropriate and short. What comes out is not anything I intended.

“I’ll come back tomorrow.”

His head lifts. “You will?”

“Yeah.”

It costs me more than the flight did.

***

Out in the hall, it’s quieter than it should be for a house this size.

She’s waiting at the top of the stairs, arms folded, not looking at me. When she does look up, there’s nothing in her face asking me for anything. That might be the problem.

“He wasn’t always like this,” she says. “After you left, he got quiet. Then he got smaller. And then my mother left too, and he never really—”

She stops. Reorganizes.

“I stayed,” she says. “I work at the firm now. I help him run it.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I know.” She holds my eyes. “I wanted to.”

There’s nothing to say, so I don’t. I go down the stairs, out the front door, and across the gravel to the car. I don’t look at the fountain or the columns or the window of a room that used to be mine.

I told Jax a week.

I have a return flight I haven’t booked, a bag I haven’t opened, and a key to a room in a building where nobody asked me a single question.

And I just promised a dying man I’d come back tomorrow.

Chapter Two

Kiera

There are two folders in the bottom drawer, and it’s the thin one that undoes me.

I find them both on a Tuesday in March, looking for a policy number. The one at the back is fat as a phone book, and I know what it is before I open it because Garth told me years ago in the flat voice he uses for things he’s decided not to feel. I’ve always known where your mother is. Eleven years of somebody following Ivy around, photographing her getting into cars.

The one in front of it is nine pages long.

EDWARDS, LOGAN G.—LOCATE. Opened three weeks after he left. Closed fourteen months later, and most of those pages are one man explaining, in increasingly careful language, what cannot be done. No death certificate. No employer, no vehicle, no lease, no account anywhere in the country attached to that name after a certain November. The conclusion is a guess, and the investigator says so: a nineteen-year-old doesn’t simply stop existing, so he’s changed his name. He added that once a petition is sealed, there is no way to search forward from the name he started with. You’d need to already know the answer.

The last page isn’t a report. It’s a note. It says he’s sorry, and that in his experience, when they’re this thorough, this young, they don’t want to be found. It’s usually kinder to let them stay lost.

Underneath it, in my stepfather’s handwriting, one word.

Continue.

Then fourteen years of nothing, because there was nothing to continue with.

The second search is stapled behind the first. It’s four pages long, and it’s dated six years ago—the winter Garth got his first bad scan and told nobody, including me. A different firm. Different tools. Somebody ran archival image searches against seventeen years of published photography, which apparently you can do now.

They came back with one hit.

It’s a car race in Portugal. The photograph isn’t of him at all—it’s a wide shot of a hospitality enclosure, and the subject is Jaxon Corbin with a sponsor’s board behind him. But there’s a man at the edge of the frame in a three-quarter profile, half-turned, not intended to be in it.