A good mother knows when she’s needed and starts running. But I was not a good mother. When a daughter needs you, when she’s in pain or struggling, a mother hears her cry and goes to her. Saves her. So why hadn’t I heard Vera’s cry for help the night she disappeared? Why couldn’t I save her?

This thought nudged me awake every morning from fitful sleep. It taunted me throughout each day when I passed Vera’s bedroom, or found strands of her blonde hair embedded in the sofa cushions. Every little thing reminded me of Vera. And it suffocated me every night when I lay restless in bed beside a snoring husband oblivious to my suffering. I shouldn’t have resented Oliver for that; it was to his credit that he was able to move on, where I couldn’t, over the past six months since Vera first vanished. But I hated him nonetheless. It wasn’t fair that I alone carried this burden of guilt. I alone hefted the what-ifs on my fragile shoulders. What if we hadn’t gone out that night? What if I had checked in more with Vera? What if…what if…what if.

That same thought pushed me into Vera’s bedroom when I was supposed to be getting Sydney a Band-Aid for her paper cut. While my three-year-old daughter wailed in the background, clutching a bloody tissue to her fingertip, I told Eliot to keep an eye on his little sister and continue cutting colorful construction paper ghosts and pumpkins to make Pappy Joe and Nana a Halloween card. Maybe I expected too much of an eight-year-old boy as I headed upstairs to the bathroom to grab a Paw Patrol Band-Aid. But I needed my fix.

I should have known better than to pause outside Vera’s room. The detours taken throughout the day to search her things for clues I blamed on my obsessive-compulsive brain. To smell her on the sheets. To sit in her space. Even now, six months gone, I knew there was something I hadn’t found. A secret I hadn’t unearthed. Secrets. I had them too.

My scattered thoughts weren’t anything new. Every morning I misplaced my half-drunk coffee cup, or forgot to finish my half-eaten breakfast. And this year I had neglected to buy Halloween costumes for the kids. With trick-or-treat quickly approaching, even Amazon two-day shipping couldn’t save me. So I handed the kids a bin full of costume oddments and told them to take their pick. This was probably why Sydney was dressed from the waist down as Snow White and the waist up as a ninja. Eliot always chose Iron Man. Vera would have posed with the little ones for a selfie and called them drippy, which was a compliment in Vera-speak. To me it sounded like an STD.

My stomach rumbled, my brain seized. What was I supposed to be doing?