I’m just trying to find Tessa.

She’s at school.

No. She hasn’t been there since this morning.

That brought a phone call from Christie instead of a text. “What is this? Tessa isn’t at school?”

“I’m trying to locate her. I just want to make sure she’s safe,” I said honestly.

“I can’t believe the school didn’t contact me,” she said, echoing my thoughts from a few moments earlier. “Where are you?”

“On the way to Connecticut checking on a lead. Are you still at the hospital?”

“Yes. They took Calvin in for surgery.”

“I heard. Listen, I’m going to do all I can to find Tessa. If she contacts you, let me know right away, okay?”

“Yes.” She jammed a paragraph of worry into that single word. “I’m calling the school.”

After she was off the line, just as I’d done on Sunday afternoon, I contacted Collins to see if she could locate Tessa’s cell, but the last location she could come up with was Timothy Sabian’s house in Ozone Park.

He took her.

He’s going to harm her.

++++

Christie tried the school, but the administrators had no idea where Tessa was, just that she wasn’t on campus.

Becoming even more distressed, she called Candice, one of the girls Tessa had started hanging out with lately, but not surprisingly, since it was during school hours, Candice didn’t pick up.

Praying that her daughter was okay, Christie stared out the window at the snow-cloaked skyline of this city of eight and a half million people, wondering where Tessa might be, wondering if she was safe, wondering how to find her.

The discussion with Dr. Werjonic came to mind, along with his declaration that truth is always a gift, no matter how hard it is to hear or to bear.

His words hit home.

Yes.

Christie couldn’t even imagine how she might react if something bad had happened to her daughter, but despite that, she wanted to know, needed to know the truth.

Earlier, she’d thought that perhaps Tessa and Pat could one day forgive her for keeping the truth from them about her cancer diagnosis, but now she thought it’d be best not to give them anything they needed to forgive her for in the first place.

A lie isn’t a gift. Truth is. And that’s what you need to give to your husband and your daughter.

Although Christie still had questions about God, about his plan for her, about how much she actually trusted him, she decided that right now loving her family was more important than her personal faith struggles.

And the way to love them was to let them know about her condition.

Trust. Love.

Truth.

But first, she needed to locate her daughter and make sure that she was okay.

First, she needed to—