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I was sixteen.

I had considerably more faith in institutional competence then.

[pause]

That did not survive adolescence.

For a long time, I told myself my interest in forensic anthropology had nothing to do with Casey.

That would have been emotionally motivated, and I preferred to believe my academic decisions were based on intellectual aptitude, professional interest, and a fascinating amount of information contained within the human skeleton.

Which is true.

It is simply not the entire truth.

Bones are honest in ways people aren’t.

They can tell you how someone lived. Repetitive labor changes them. Injury changes them. Disease changes them. Nutrition, age, stress, violence—the body keeps records even when the person carrying it never intended to leave any behind. There are limits, though. A skeleton cannot tell you someone’s favorite song or whether they took their coffee with enough sugar to qualify it as dessert. It cannot tell you that someone cheated at Monopoly with such consistency that allowing her to remain banker became an act of collective negligence.

[pause]

There is a particular kind of grief involved in losing someone without knowing what happened to them. Death is an answer, even when it is a terrible one. A disappearance is a question that keeps asking itself.

You don’t know whether you’re supposed to mourn.

You don’t know whether hoping is cruel or giving up is worse.

Every story about someone found after ten years, fifteen years, twenty years becomes evidence for a possibility you know is disappearing beneath you.

And people move on.

They have to.

The posters come down. Search parties stop. News coverage gets smaller and then disappears entirely. People stop asking because they don’t know what to say anymore.

Eventually, everyone else gets to remember Casey.

I was still waiting for her.

[pause]

BARYN:

You’ve told me what she was like. You’ve told me what she meant to you. And I know you’ve already given me more of yourself here than you probably intended to.

SERENA:

Significantly more.

BARYN:

Yeah.

[pause]

BARYN:

So you can tell me to fuck off if this is one question too many.