She had been twelve when Leslie disappeared. Leah had lost her big sister, but in a way Leslie had become larger than life in her absence. Every day was about Leslie. Where was Leslie? Who had taken Leslie? Was Leslie dead or alive? Every day of their lives had been about Leslie and the search for Leslie.

Leah had stayed in the background—both by her parents’ design and by her own choice.

“When I was in fifth grade,” Wendy went on, “I was walking home from school with a friend. We were cutting through Oakwoods Park and this creepy kid, Dennis Farman, started chasing us, and we ended up practically falling on a dead body.”

“Oh my God,” Leah said. “That’s horrible!”

“It was. It was gross and freaky and scary.”

“Why was the person dead?”

“She was murdered by a serial killer who turned out to be my best friend’s dad.”

“No way!”

“Way.”

“Oh my God! That’s crazy!”

And in a totally sick way, fantastic. Not fantastic that the person had been murdered, or that Wendy’s friend’s dad was a serial killer, but that something equally bizarre had happened in Wendy’s life as had happened in Leah’s. She didn’t have to feel like such a freak. Wendy had gone through something insane too.

“What happened?” she asked.

“It’s a long story,” Wendy said, “but Tommy’s dad went to prison.”

“That has to be tough on your friend.”

“I suppose so. But his mother took him and left town, and no one ever heard from them again. Nobody knows where they went,” she said. “I always thought I would hear from him, you know, like a postcard or a phone call or something, but I never have.”

She looked over at Leah. Her eyes were bright blue like cornflowers. “You must wonder about your sister all the time.”

“Yeah,” Leah said, though that wasn’t exactly true.

Most of the time she tried hard not to think about Leslie. It was too painful. It was too upsetting to imagine what might have happened to her sister or what was happening to her even now. Those thoughts came to her often enough in dreams and nightmares.

Sometimes she imagined the worst, that the man who had taken Leslie had done terrible things to her, then killed her and dumped her body someplace to rot. Sometimes she imagined her sister was living an exciting life in some exciting place, and that she had amnesia, and that was why they hadn’t heard from her in all these years.

People got amnesia all the time on the soap operas.

It probably didn’t happen in real life, though. In fact, her mother had told her in no uncertain terms that it didn’t happen, and that it hadn’t happened to Leslie.