But there were some things James had not told me about Hannah Nilsson. Things I discovered on my own over the years. It was rare that James would mention her, but she did come up every once in a while in conversations with his old friends. And of course, there was the occasional Internet search, usually on a late night when James had been called into the hospital and I’d had a few glasses of wine. Hannah’s disappearance had predated the Internet, but she’d been a model, and pretty girls who disappear attract a kind of attention that can linger on for years.

Hannah was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. Tall and lithe, with sun-kissed skin and wavy blonde hair, pale-blue eyes and a charming, crooked smile. She had a slight gap in between her two front teeth. But rather than marring her beauty, it highlighted it. See? it seemed to say. Even with this imperfection, I’m still a goddess walking among mortals.

According to the journalists who wrote about Hannah’s disappearance, it was widely known in her industry that she was poised not just for success but for stardom. She could have been among the next generation of supermodels, in an era when many of them were more well-known than Hollywood actresses. I’d often wondered if these rosy predictions were really true, or if the reporters who covered her disappearance were mythologizing her, as people tend to do with the deceased. A beautiful girl on the brink of fame mysteriously vanishes? It made for a more interesting story, after all.

When she disappeared, Hannah’s parents were both still alive, and living in her home country of Sweden. They never came to the United States, not even while the search effort was ongoing. In the one interview that Hannah’s mother, Elin, gave to a local newspaper, she’d said simply “I’m not surprised. I always knew Hannah would die young.” It was a shocking statement from a mother, but I figured something may have gotten lost in translation. Both of her parents had since passed away. I knew that Hannah was an only child, and as far as my Internet sleuthing revealed, she had no surviving family.

I also knew that for months after Hannah vanished, James barely ate or slept. But this was another detail James hadn’t mentioned; Parker told me on the night before my wedding. Parker had been James’s best man, and had given a typically witty speech at the rehearsal dinner, spinning a funny story about how James had once worn his surgical scrubs out to a club, thinking it would attract women.