I discounted it, as I had been trained to do. I didn’t even call out to the girls to reassure myself. I went into my workroom off the kitchen and put the sample books on the table. I would come back after dinner and write up my notes regarding the Ivorys’ beach house. But even as I forced myself to do something normal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. I felt tense to the point that I jumped when Leah came to the workroom door.

“Hi, honey,” I said, trying for my usual mom smile. “How was your day with Teenzilla?”

Leah’s eyes filled with tears. “Leslie went to the softball game.”

“She what?” I said, anger overriding whatever else it was that I was feeling.

Leslie might have been headstrong, but she had always been responsible. I would never have gone out that day if I had for one minute thought she would disregard her sentence and leave her sister home alone.

“She went to the softball game,” Leah said. The story all came out in an unpunctuated rush. “She said she would be back before you or Daddy but she’s been gone forever and Valerie Finley called for her and I told her Leslie went to the game and she said she saw her at the game but that the game has been over for hours and Leslie was supposed to call her when she got home.”

She dissolved into tears then and fell into my arms, apologizing. Whether she was apologizing to me or to her sister wasn’t clear, but I wrapped my arms around her, told her not to cry.

Don’t think this way. Don’t feel that way . . .

Even as I told her to deny her feelings, my own eyes filled with tears, and I knew in my heart that we were all about to fall down a rabbit hole into an alternate universe, and nothing would ever be the same again.

I spent the next two hours swinging wildly between anger and worry as I called the homes of Leslie’s friends. She was probably still out with one or more of them. It was Saturday. They had probably gone to the mall or to a movie and lost track of time. Or maybe she hadn’t lost track of time at all, and she was just pushing her defiance even further out on a limb.

I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her—something I had never done in her entire life.

I kept looking at the clock, willing Lance to come home. He had gone off before noon for a stick-and-ball game and a few beers with some of his polo buddies. He had said he would be home to grill steaks by six. It was six forty before he walked in the door.