I nod and think out loud. “Maybe he hunts for treasures like in Tomb Raider and he got caught?”

“What if he was kidnapped?” she says. Then she whispers, “People used to get kidnapped in Colombia all the time. And there are earthquakes. My mom said that’s why we could never go there.”

Maybe that’s why Mom always insisted: No, I’m never going back to Colombia. Was she afraid of getting kidnapped? Afraid of earthquakes? I shake my head. No, Mom isn’t afraid of anything.

“Why do they call it kidnapping when it happens to adults?” Mattie asks.

“Mattie,” I say, “focus.”

She shrugs. “What if—”

Two sixth-grade boys turn the corner and walk toward us. I glare at them and they scurry away.

Mattie tries again. “What if he has a new family? What if he married some…” Her face darkens. “I don’t know, a French woman, and now he lives in France and eats cheese?”

Eats cheese? I shake my head at her. She’s so weird. “Maybe he hit his head during one of his expeditions into the jungle and has amnesia.” I picture tall trees and jungle vines and coconuts. “And now he doesn’t remember us or our moms. Or even his own name.”

“Like in a TV show?”

I sigh. “I guess that’s not very likely.” Francisco Gómez’s disappearance probably isn’t because of something interesting or exciting or even dangerous. He probably just never wanted to be found. Never wanted to meet either of his daughters. I want there to be a good reason neither of us has ever met him. But there probably isn’t.

Maybe Mattie has been thinking the same thing because her shoulders slump. “What if he works in a super-boring office job in some boring city and is ashamed that he’s not a famous archaeologist anymore?”

“Anthropologist,” I correct, and snatch my phone back from her. And tap the name of our father.

CHAPTER 11 Mattie

Francisco Gómez Flores is not dead. Sitting on the floor in the breezeway during lunch, Mercedes and I scroll through all the search results on her phone. It’s clear that he’s not married to a cheese-eating French woman. He doesn’t have a boring office job. It seems unlikely that he was ever kidnapped. What is obvious is that Francisco Gómez Flores is most definitely an anthropologist.

“Look at that,” Mercedes says and then she whistles that way people do when something is amazing. I can’t whistle at all. If I could, right now I would, because what we’re looking at is amazing. On the screen in front of us is a whole page of important-sounding websites and articles, pictures, and diagrams, all about or by Francisco Gómez Flores.