I WAS SURE I’D WOKEN up in the spa: the same sharp, invasive quality to the light, the same insistent white walls. But there were noises I couldn’t explain. Voices I didn’t know. And my mother, in the corner, asleep in a chair, her head cranked at an uncomfortable angle. I’d never felt so tired. A dull pain erupted when I turned my head, a throbbing above my eye.

And then I remembered. The bar, the man, the way he propped me against him, carried me to the motel, the sign blinking weakly above us. Then I wondered if maybe I was dead—the room had an otherworldly quality, and I couldn’t get the proportions right. Everything was shifting; distances and shapes felt impossible to resolve. The walls looked too close, and then very far away. An IV full of mysterious liquid dripped into my bloodstream, and I closed my eyes again and slept.

I FOUND out later that my mother kept the TV off, kept newspapers out of the room. But when I woke up I asked about both of them: Clara and Emily. Clara had been missing, and the flash of silver under the mat of the man’s car: Emily’s cross. My mother pointed to a bouquet of flowers on the bedside table. Clara had brought them while I was asleep—she tucked a little card in among the tulips.

“And Emily?” I asked. My mother’s mouth gaped a little, as though she was surprised I’d asked. She shook her head, and I felt the tears seep from my eyes, down my face, hit the pillow until I fell asleep again.

ONCE I was really awake, a detective came to talk to me about what I remembered, what I could tell him. I described the man for the police, who produced a sketch based on what I said. It had the flat, lifeless quality that all police sketches have—I didn’t know how to tell them the things that made him distinct. The pale blue eyes, the elegant fingers, the shape of his jaw. Those were correct, but without the anger I had seen in him, they didn’t matter. I described the car, too, and eventually they found one like it, submerged in a pond in the Pine Barrens forty miles west. They searched it, but Emily’s cross necklace was nowhere to be found. They couldn’t recover any DNA, and the car was registered to an eighty-eight-year-old woman from Delaware who had died in 2008. I told him, too, about the paintings. How the man had been in the bar that night, how he approached me at the library, too.

“Paintings?” the detective said, sounding bemused when I told him how I had ended up in the car. I could tell he thought I was a fool.