• The car abandoned just before the gas station.
• Out of gas.
• Nothing inside but her cell phone, attached to the charger.
• Every field, every home, everywhere searched and searched.
• Then, two days later, her credit card used at a nearby casino resort.
• And her clothes, still wet, found in the hotel room—along with the note.
• The note which explained everything—and nothing.

“And you didn’t stop? You didn’t help her?” Nic asked.

The woman rambled on about how she slowed to a crawl, but then a truck came from the other direction.

“A truck?”

“Yes. It was a pickup truck. Dark color. It stopped and she got in.”

Nic was on her feet, then quickly buckled over.

“I read everything I could find,” the woman said. “About the car found the next morning and the gas station closed and then the winds and blackout. Oh, and how the town searched for her everywhere until they found that gut-wrenching note in a hotel room. Your poor mother and everything she’d been through. And then the case was closed, or reclassified, I think it said. They were calling it a ‘walk away’ in the press.”

That was exactly how things had gone down.

Nic and her father had been there with the search parties. Four days in Hastings that had become a blur of images. Rough sketches of cold air and stiff cornstalks, stale bitter coffee on folding tables brought by the local residents. The bar across from the inn. Vodka. Tequila. A stranger in the back hallway—the bartender. It had not been pretty.

Then came the slow reveal of the family’s bad behavior on the day of the disappearance.

Nic’s cruel words in the kitchen overheard by the cleaners. Evan’s shunning of his mother’s visit witnessed by the kids on his team. And Molly Clarke’s husband, John, who didn’t even notice that his wife hadn’t come home because he’d fallen asleep.

And why would that be? He had a million excuses. It took everything inside Nic not to give them the real one—that he didn’t love his wife anymore. That he was having an affair. Nic had seen his car in town when he said he was at the office. She’d seen the way he avoided looking at her but then was suddenly polite and considerate, covering his tracks. There were so many changes, and they were recent. They were new, subtle changes. Except for the one that screamed out to be noticed. For the first time since his wife killed his daughter, he seemed happy.

All of this bad behavior had come on the anniversary of Annie’s death five years before.