It slows as it reaches me, then finally comes to a halt right next to my car.

Is it them?

It has to be them.

The Jeep’s tinted front passenger window is streaked with melted snow, allowing me only the faintest definition of a shape inside.

My heart races, my throat clogged to the point of asphyxia, wondering if their window is going to roll down.

And then, it does.

There’s only one person in the car, and it’s the last person I expect to see.

He looks right at me, his gaze soul-searching, as if we’ve known each other in so many different lives that there’s nothing I can do to hide from him. Not his presence, his thoughts, his accusations, his truth. In his look, he knows everything.

Detective Colin Pearson.

Sixty-Five

10:42 a.m.

Colin had thought about visiting James and Maggie Benner ever since Chief Sike told him about Caleb’s disappearance twenty-two years ago, but he knew the pain he’d cause would outweigh any good. You never wanted to rip open old wounds if you weren’t bringing any recent developments on the cold case.

And Colin knew better. There were no old wounds for those who’d lost a child. There were just wounds, forever open and festering, with no promise of even a crusty scab, much less any real healing.

So he drove out to the Benners’ place on this day of cold and snow, a day of such quiet he felt as if he were navigating the lunar landscape, desolate in its isolation, painful in its beauty.

Colin didn’t know what he was going to ask them. Maybe he wouldn’t ask them anything. Maybe he’d just tell them he was someone with information about their son and preferred to remain anonymous. Perhaps he’d tell them what he suspected about the Yates family and then just slip away, leaving them to their own devices.

That kind of thing would get him fired, no doubt.

But moreover, it was just wrong. He only knew what he knew, and all that knowledge stopped short of certainty. Maybe Cora Yates was just unfortunate in that she was one of the last to see Caleb. Perhaps the floor repairs Logan Yates rushed to complete the day after Caleb disappeared had been needed for years. Maybe Rose Yates truly mourned the death of her husband, who died accidentally when his desire for deep sleep outweighed his common sense.

But when Colin thought about it, really thought about it, it wasn’t information he wanted to impart to the Benner family. He wanted advice.

How do you do it?

How do you push on, day by day, with such blackness covering your every thought? Does laughing make you feel guilty? Were you ever intimate again after your son disappeared, and if so, was that an act of love or just sheer desperation for touch, a need to feel something?

Colin knew a lot about survivors and their coping mechanisms… You couldn’t be a detective and not know such things. But all he’d learned couldn’t reconcile how he felt, which was that he didn’t think he could last another week.