Captain Underpants’ tra-la-lahhh battle cry faded in the background, along with everything around me. My heart sank; it was just someone commenting with yet another prayer emoji that the police would find her soon. Except I had already given up hundreds, maybe even thousands of prayers for God to bring her back to me, and He had yet to deliver. What was the point of faith if God wasn’t listening?

As my finger continued clicking, scrolling, clicking, scrolling, my eyes scanned for anything new. Anything relevant to Vera. Day after day I found nothing but #momlife memes and book club recommendations and kittens and political noise. It killed me, like tiny paper cuts slowly bleeding me to death, when I watched the world continue to live while I died. Each day slicing deeper. Each morning bringing fresh pain. Each breath a weep.

Everyone else got to live their lives, while my daughter stayed missing, lost somewhere in the world, unable to make her way home. The pettiness of everyone else’s “problems” infuriated me, not so much that I wished their own kids would go missing, but better theirs than mine. Because a missing child was a real problem, not some make-believe offense over supporting the wrong sports team, the latest celebrity victim of cancel culture, or whether or not you’re properly wearing your face mask in public.

I clicked over to a Facebook support group for mothers whose children had gone missing. The consolation it offered was mostly symbolic, but it helped, a little. As my fingertip touched the screen, my phone was ripped from my hand.

“Hey!” I looked up to find Oliver holding my phone out of reach. “What the hell?”

“What the hell is right. I’ve been trying to get your attention for five minutes, Felicity. You spend more time on Facebook than taking care of the kids.”

Touché. Maybe I had been wrapped up in my phone…and my emptiness again. But didn’t a missing child warrant it? “I’m trying to find our daughter, Ollie. That’s more than you’re doing.”

“Right now I’m more concerned about whatever’s burning in the oven,” he said, gesturing toward the smoke billowing against the oven window.

The brownies! Had it been fifteen minutes already? I turned off the oven and whipped the door open, releasing a fog of charred chocolate smoke into the kitchen and fanning it away with my mitted hand before the smoke alarm started screaming. First the broken glass, now the burned brownies. And none of it mattered because Vera was missing and I had no idea if she was dead or alive.

“You’re constantly on your phone or in your own head,” Oliver continued ranting, “and it’s like the rest of us don’t exist anymore. There’s a point where we have to move on…accept this as the new normal. Without Vera—”