Page 6

Gone the summer before our junior year.

No body. No arrest. No answers.

For a while, people searched. There were flyers on every telephone pole in town. Casey’s freckle-faced, bright smile taped to the windows of the grocery store and the diner.

Eventually the flyers faded.

The search parties got smaller.

The conversations shifted.

Years passed with nothing to go on, and the town did what towns tend to do when something painful refuses to resolve.

It moved on.

I swivel my chair toward the window, toward the city skyline and the life I built specifically to avoid having to return to Stillwater.

“You have people,” I say carefully. “Good people. State consultants. You don’t need me.”

“We do need you,” Mara says plainly.

Then she corrects herself.

“I need you.”

The look in her eyes when I spin back to face her tells me she knew that would work before she said it.

“It’s been seventeen years.”

“And it still fucking sucks.”

I press my lips together.

I think about my lab at the museum. My active contracts. The work I haven’t finished yet.

I think about the version of myself who promised she wouldn’t get pulled backward if Stillwater finally decided to really look under its own floorboards.

“This is not neutral for me,” I say. “You know that.”

“I do,” she says softly.

Then, firmer, “That’s why I called you first.”

A loaded silence stretches between us.

My eyes drift back to the remains on my table.

Early on, I learned the value of separating what matters emotionally from what matters evidentially.

Personal effects are logged first. Handled carefully. Documented quickly. Then they are removed from the workspace. Not because they’re unimportant.

Quite the opposite.

Objects collapse distance. They invite speculation. The moment you start imagining the person who wore the watch or chose the earrings, you are no longer working with remains.

You are working with absence.

And absence is a feeling that is notoriously difficult to manage.