“Felicity!” Oliver’s voice dragged me out of the awful memory of the night Vera disappeared, back into the even more awful present.

The scribbled words of Vera’s journal dissolved into her bedroom comforter. It took a moment for me to realize I’d been standing in her room, holding my phone…doing what? Looking up something on the Internet? Oh yeah, the tribal design. I recognized it from somewhere, the memory sticky like taffy. But from where?

“Mommy!” Now Eliot’s voice joined the commotion of Oliver yelling for me, the dogs barking somewhere in the house, and Sydney screaming. All I wanted was a minute to try to remember where I had seen the drawing before.

I didn’t know if it was a clue, or if it was some small insignificant detail of Vera’s life that I wasn’t a part of. But nothing about her life felt insignificant anymore. Every little piece of her was now evidence essential to finding her.

Downstairs the crying and yelling grew louder, so loud that the sound followed me into Vera’s bedroom, smashing against my eardrums. When I turned around, Oliver stood directly behind me, handing me a bloody child, a cordless phone perched between his shoulder and ear.

“Please, sweetheart,” he said in a wheedling tone I knew all too well, “take care of Sydney. I’m on a work call and the kids need their mother.”

Blood gushed from Sydney’s lip, dripping down her chin onto my shoulder where she rested her head. One chubby arm clutched the velveteen rabbit that had been Vera’s as a baby, Sydney’s self-soother in her sister’s absence. Another bloody dribble fell on the rabbit’s ear. How the heck had a paper cut turned into a bloody lip?

“Oh, sweetie, what happened?”

“Idiot”—her name for Eliot, which Oliver and I had found hilarious the first time she said it; the poor kid’s nickname had stuck—“pushed me and I owied my lip.” She thrust her swollen bottom lip out in a crimson and purple pout.

It was always something with these two. One pushing the other. The other biting back. Someone always ended up in tears…and it was usually me.

My lips brushed against her salty cheek. “My poor babycakes. Let’s get that owie feeling better, okay, Syd Squid?”