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“Do you want to stay here?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“Right. Good. We’ve narrowed it down then.”

She rubs Bun's ear between her fingers. “When is Mommy coming back?”

I close my eyes for half a second. When I open them, Lucy is watching me with the exhausted patience of someone who already knows adults are useless.

“I’m trying to find that out,” I say.

“Daddy says she does this.”

Everything in me stills. Not because Lucy sounds angry. She doesn’t.

And that’s the part that unsettles me the most.

Since Maggie disappeared, Lucy has asked for her mother dozens of times. She asks where she is, when she’s coming back, whether she forgot about her.

She’s never asked for Tom.

Not once.

Even now, talking about him feels procedural, like there’s a duty to consider him without him having any real emotional importance in events.

My fingers curl into the rug. “What else does Daddy say?”

“That Mommy goes away when she gets sad.”

Tom’s voice enters my head without permission. Smooth, tired, reasonable. Maggie does this. She runs. She gets overwhelmed. Don’t make it worse.

The problem with reasonable people is that they can hide knives in perfectly calm sentences.

“Has she gone away before?” I ask.

Lucy shrugs again, and I can’t tell whether I’m pressing too hard or not hard enough. Parenting seems to require a complex level of emotional calibration I don't possess.

Think, Laurel, think.

“Did she come back before?” I ask gently.

Lucy nods.

“Then we’ll keep looking,” I say. “And we’ll make sure she knows you’re waiting for her.”

Her lip trembles. “What if she forgot me?”

“No.” The word comes out too fast. Too firm. “No, Lucy. She didn’t forget you.”

She looks like she wants to believe me but doesn’t know how.

I don’t blame her.

I barely know how to believe myself.

By noon, I'm at almost at the end of my tether with my inadequacy. There's only the unbearable pressure of not knowing what to do next.

So I do what any responsible adult would do. I Google, “What to do with sad five year old weekend small town.”