She shook her head. “No, I want to be home in case he calls. You will find him, Kate?”

George was looking at me with a familiar anxious hope in her eyes. I had seen it before in the faces of people driven to their breaking point. Sometimes you love someone so much that when something bad happens to them, you’ll do anything to keep them safe. If I promised to make Eduardo magically appear if George stabbed herself in the heart, she would do it. She was drowning and she was begging me for some straw to grasp.

I opened my mouth to lie and couldn’t. The last time I promised to find someone, I found her chewed-up corpse. That was how Julie came to live with me. “I promise you that we will do everything we can. We’ll keep looking and we won’t stop until we find something or you ask us to walk away.”

The relief was plain in her eyes. She hadn’t heard a thing I said except “we’ll find something.” “Thank you.”

George left. I headed upstairs while Curran lingered downstairs to check the doors. It was our nightly ritual. He checked the doors downstairs and I checked the windows on the second floor, while Julie checked the third. I climbed to the second floor and stopped. Julie sat on the landing, wrapped in her blanket. She was holding a stuffed owl.

I remembered the look on Julie’s face when she told me she’d seen the torn-up body of her mother. It was seared into my memory. After Julie’s father died, her mother drank too much and didn’t pay as much attention to Julie’s existence as she used to, but she loved her daughter deeply and Julie loved her back with the single-minded devotion of a child. A piece of Julie’s childhood died that day, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never bring it back. I had wished so badly that I could have found Jessica Olsen alive, but she died before I had even started looking.