Patting his flat little bum, I sent them to the living room while I dragged all three dogs by their collars out through the back door and into the yard. While sweeping up the shards, a macabre thought slivered into my brain. What would it feel like to just jab one of these glossy spikes through my heart and end it all? Wouldn’t work. There was already a gaping black hole there…in the place where my love for Vera had been.

Stop.

Enough.

I couldn’t let go when so many people needed me to hang on. But it was so damn hard to hold on to so much at once.

When the glass had been cleaned up, I wanted to make it up to the kids with a treat. If I was being honest, I needed to more than I wanted to. I owed them so much more than a sugary bribe, but I found it harder and harder each day to be who they deserved me to be.

“Who wants brownies?” I called out from the kitchen with a fake cheer that the kids believed.

“Me!” both kids replied in unison. When do we outgrow childlike simplicity? I wondered now if I’d ever had it.

“No nuts in the brownies, Mom!” Eliot added over the sound of the show.

I pulled out my mother’s recipe for homemade double-chocolate-chip brownies, mentally adjusted the ingredients for Sydney’s kidney-friendly diet, and slipped into the pantry. Within ten minutes I mixed the batter, poured it into a glass baking dish, and slid it into the oven. While it cooked, I swept clean the espresso-stained butcher block island—a rich contrast to the white quartz countertops throughout the rest of the kitchen—then shifted my brain to what to make for dinner tonight. I dreaded meal planning almost as much as I dreaded grocery shopping. Eliot hardly ate anything but tacos these days, and Sydney wouldn’t touch a vegetable unless I smothered it in cheese.

As I piled the dirty bakeware into the sink, my phone beeped with a notification. Opening up my Facebook app, I checked to see if it had anything to do with my latest post about our ongoing search for Vera. The Crimestoppers post featuring last year’s school picture and her physical details had been shared over 5k times and had 1.4k comments:

MISSING: Vera Portman

Missing since: 4/16/2021

Age: 15

Race: White

Sex: Female

Height: Approx. 5’2” tall

Weight: Approx. 105 pounds

Hair: Blonde

Eyes: Green

Six months of shared posts. Six months of friends’ crying emojis and sympathetic comments. Six months of nothing helpful.