There’s no one she can call. Quinn can’t stop thinking this. If anyone finds out Maddie’s not here they’ll take her from her and won’t ever give her back.

Maddie’s coat and boots are missing also. “Madeleine,” Quinn says again, in the middle of the kitchen. It feels less scary when it isn’t quiet; hearing her daughter’s name out in the air is better than hearing only the silence of her not being here.

She opens the door to the apartment. It’s still so cold, and she breathes in one sharp breath.

“Maddie,” she says, but quiet again, because she doesn’t want to wake the neighbors. Because the neighbors, just like the cops that she can’t call, just like anyone she might think of who might help—they could just as likely take her from her. They could just as likely make it so that she might never see her little girl again.

“Madeleine,” Quinn whispers over and over. She walks through the parking lot, her breath quick. She has no gloves, and her fingers are already cold and stiff as she clutches her phone, checking. She keeps thinking that this space of time in which she feels shoveled out again and can’t quite breathe and her head feels like someone is pressing hard against it, on top of it, that this time will soon have passed.

A hundred feet in front of her are woods, dark and thick. The Hudson is five hundred feet past that. There’s ice out there, chunks of it. Maddie likes to go and watch it, the way it collects and cracks and travels down the river like tiny sideways boats, all white and yellow. When Madeleine was very small she used to ask if she could ride them, and Quinn was always worried, if they got too close, she’d dive in. She’d disappear.