Clarissa became our daughter because she was born into this mess. Did that make us family?

Maybe you simply have to start somewhere.

I held out my hand. Jason crossed to me. And slowly, very slowly, he reached out a finger and brushed Clarissa’s cheek.

“I will keep you safe,” he murmured. “I promise nothing bad will ever happen to you. I promise, I promise, I promise.”

Then he was clutching my hand and I could feel the true force of his emotions, the dark tide of all the things he would never tell me, but that I understood, one survivor to another, lurked beneath the surface.

He kissed me. He kissed me with Clarissa nestled between us, a hard kiss, a powerful kiss.

“I will always keep you safe,” he whispered again, his cheek against my cheek, his tears mingling with my tears. “I promise you, Sandy. I will never hurt you.”

And I believed him.

At 5:59, as Aidan Brewster was checking in for his weekly support group meeting, Jason Jones was putting in a movie for his daughter, and beginning to panic.

He’d called in sick to work. Didn’t know what else to do. Night was falling. Still no word from Sandy. Still no sign of the police. Ree had woken from her nap in the same quiet mood as before. They had played Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders and Go Fish.

Then they had sat at her teeny art table, him with his chin on his knees, and colored oversized pictures of Cinderella from Ree’s favorite coloring book. Mr. Smith did not magically appear on the front stoop and Ree stopped asking about either her cat or her mom. Instead, she regarded Jason with serious brown eyes that were beginning to haunt him.

After dinner—meatballs, angel hair pasta, and sliced cucumbers-he put in a movie. Ree had perked up in anticipation of the rare treat, and was now seated on the green love seat, holding Lil’ Bunny. Jason claimed he needed to do laundry and beat a hasty retreat to the basement.

There, he started pacing, and once he started, he couldn’t stop.

When he had first come home and realized Sandra was not in the house, he had been confused, perhaps even anxious. He’d gone through the normal steps: checked the basement, checked the attic, checked the old shed out back. Then he’d called her cell, only to hear it ring in her purse. That had led him to rifling the contents halfheartedly, looking through her little spiral notebook to see if she’d magically recorded a middle-of-the-night meeting. When at two-thirty A.M. he confirmed his wife hadn’t planned to go missing, he’d walked around the neighborhood, calling her name in a low whisper, much like how one might call a cat.

She wasn’t in her car. She wasn’t in his car. And she still wasn’t at home.