“Be quiet,” Holly snapped.

“Thanks.” I wrote down hot dogs and hoped I could find healthy ones. “How about hamburgers, Holly?”

She didn’t answer.

“Whale? Groundhog? Tasmanian Devil stew?”

No response.

“Maybe you’re vegetarians. I make a mean salad out of leaves and twigs.”

Noelle actually giggled.

In a quick preview of her adolescence, Holly rolled her eyes. “Can we go now?”

I pretended to think it over. “Well, if you do, you’re leaving the menu up to me. And you’ll have to eat every bite of whatever I choose.”

“Fish and chips,” she said, as if I’d dragged the words out of her with a real fishing rod.

I knew better than to push. “Great. We’re done for now. Want baths or showers tonight?”

I was so tired by seven-thirty—the time my internet parenting research insisted I should tuck them in—that I thought about crawling in with them. Safely in bed, though, neither girl looked sleepy.

I widened my own eyes to keep them open. “Would one of you like to say the prayer tonight?”

Of course neither volunteered. I repeated a version of the previous night’s, and asked if they wanted a story. Again, no response.

I pulled Holly’s Frozen sheet over her shoulders. No surprise her back was to me. I expected the same treatment from Noelle, but when I made it to her bedside, she was watching me intently.

“Why didn’t Mommy come home?”

The question had taken so long to emerge that whatever story I’d concocted yesterday disappeared. Luckily, Holly gave me time to rethink it.

“Shut up, Noelle!”

“‘Shut up’ is something we don’t say,” I told her. “Everybody has the right to ask questions.”

“Noelle...” Holly’s tone was still threatening.

By then I’d recovered my poise. “Like your gram said, your mom found out she had other commitments and couldn’t leave when she planned to. She has a friend who needs her help.”

“Why didn’t she tell us?” Noelle asked.

Noelle had said this as if Wendy communicated with her daughters directly. There were several ways to read her question, but I wasn’t taking chances.

“How would she tell you?” I asked.

“Holly’s phone.”

Holly sat up. “I’m trying to go to sleep.”

So far out of the parenting groove was I, that an eight-year-old with her own phone stunned me. “Does she text you, Holly? Or does she talk to you?”

Holly just glared at me.

“She puts words on the screen,” Noelle said.

“Holly, has your mom texted you in the last few days?” Holly stared blankly at me.

I waited, but an answer had been too much to expect. “If you do hear from her, will you let me know?”

She lay back down and presented her back once more.

Holly hadn’t denied having a phone, or receiving texts. During my search I hadn’t gotten as far as their bedroom, so of course I hadn’t found it. On the other hand, my suspicious little niece probably took the phone with her everywhere and hid it inside a pocket of her backpack while she was at school. The same school that had required two forms so I could pick them up in the afternoons probably did not encourage cell phones on desks.