I traced my finger across the antique desk, smiling at her scribbles that marred the wood. A DIY project she had worked on with Oliver back when she was ten...back when she still craved her father’s attention. We had found the writing desk on a visit to the Fields Estate, a forlorn ancestral mansion whose designation by the state of Pennsylvania as an historical landmark had saved it from demolition. The home had belonged to Oliver’s great-grandfather Robert Fields, a silk importer tycoon, and Alvera, his wife. The couple’s only daughter, Olivia, had inherited the home, and while she had maintained its magnificence for many decades, in recent years it had fallen into disrepair after her death. Oliver and his brother Cody were hopeful of restoring the structure to its Edwardian era splendor—a mammoth physical and financial undertaking—and had secured an Historic Preservation Tax Credit for that purpose to honor Alvera Fields’ legacy.

The desk had been covered in dust, yet the bones solid. An intriguing piece, Vera had discovered a secret hollow leg that contained old letters, a fun find when they were restoring it. Together Vera and Oliver sanded and painted it in a rich white chalk paint. The project kindled a creative spark in her. Since then she’d collected and restored a four-poster bedframe, a dresser to match, and a stool that fit snugly under her desk. That winter I watched Vera and her father sweat and work their fingers raw in the freezing cold detached garage, warmed only by a single space heater while they created this bedroom, bonding over paint swatches and knob hardware. Vera had seemed so happy back then. What changed in my daughter that made her run away?

I cried this question daily.

I could never hear an answer through the sobs.

Up to 2.8 million teens in the United States run away from home each year. Ninety-nine percent of them return home safely. The stats were supposed to comfort me as Detective Montgomery delivered them by rote the first time we met on April 16, the blackest black-letter date of my life. Where was my 99 percent assuredness of my daughter’s safe return home? Because it had been six months and still no Vera.

We had scoured every inch of the Steel City, from the projects where crumbling brick townhomes decayed along with the desolate steel mills, to the money-soaked upper-middle-class neighborhoods like ours. But in a city of three hundred thousand faces, I couldn’t find my daughter’s.

I admit the staggering number of missing children shocked me, but not as much as the possibility that Vera would willingly choose to leave her beautiful home, her parents who loved her, her siblings who adored her. She had everything. But believing Vera had chosen to leave was better than the alternative: that she’d been kidnapped or murdered, which the police told me was unlikely.

No body had been found. No evidence of an abduction.