“Gill, this is our one night a month. You know how hard it is to get the guys together since Pat and Jamal became dads.”

Way to hit me in the solar plexus. I close my eyes.

“Yeah. Okay. But can you not stay super-late?”

“Yeah, I mean, I figure Dev will kick us all out pretty early anyway.” He stands up, brushes down his pants. “So what are you gonna do for the day?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe Sam and I will go check out the farmer’s market.” Sam’s got some foodie interests, maybe he’ll like it.

Oliver kisses me on the cheek and heads downstairs, and soon after I hear the front door close. I sigh, and glance over at the nightstand, where my phone is. I check my messages—no surprise there, Abigail’s phone is still off. I navigate to my emails and type in her email address. Maybe it’s something about the memories that I kept having last night, maybe it’s something about how tender and bruised the sky looks outside as we wait for snow—but what I feel for my sister right now isn’t anger.

Whatever it is, I type, you can tell me.

I hit Send.

Then, phone still in hand, I hesitate, and pull up the browser app. Apparently I forgot to plug in my phone last night after my midnight cookie raid so it’s low on battery, but I type finding someone who doesn’t want to be found and hit Search.

There are so many entries. So, so many stories. Forums upon forums of people wanting to find someone they’ve lost: missing spouses, absent parents, vanished children; old flames, high school friends, legal beneficiaries. The list is endless. It’s overwhelming, to see how many people are out there searching for someone they may never find. And then all the professional services advertising to those people: psychics and support groups and, yes, private investigators.

I find myself on a series of websites, private investigators with headshots that make them look like corporate lawyers, boasting about their success rates and all the various methods they use to find our missing loved ones. It’s startling, actually, to realize how much information about private citizens is available to buy and sell. Even just on our two-hour drive down to Westchester, it sounds like our license plate was probably recorded by a variety of private companies, automatically storing data about us and where we were driving. I start to have a bit more sympathy with Oliver’s general paranoia about everything from DNA testing to Amazon’s Alexa.