Oh Lord, Letty thought. She sat up and looked around the bed. No sign of Maya’s beloved companion. She lifted the covers.

“Look under the bed,” she told Maya. “Maybe Ellie’s hiding under there.”

The child giggled and crawled under the bed. “She’s not here.”

“Check the bathroom. Maybe she needed to go pee-pee.”

Maya wandered away. “Ellie,” she called. “C’mere, Ellie.”

A moment later Maya was standing by the side of the bed wailing. “Ellie’s not there! I want my Ellie.”

“We’ll find her,” Letty said grimly.

Not finding Ellie was not an option. She could remember other incidents when the stuffed elephant had gone missing. There was the time Tanya’s new housekeeper had made the mistake of tossing it into the toy box and piling other toys on top, which had resulted in an epic meltdown from Maya, and the unsympathetic housekeeper’s subsequent sacking. Once, shortly after Evan and Tanya separated and Evan had Maya for her first visitation, Tanya had “forgotten” to pack Ellie in the child’s overnight bag.

Maya’s resulting case of hysterics had led to a series of frantic late-night emergency calls to Tanya, who, Letty always suspected, had rather enjoyed the spectacle of seeing Evan, exhausted and unshaven, having cut his weekend plans short, drive back from the Hamptons to deposit Maya back on her doorstep at six o’clock the next morning.

Of course, he’d accused Tanya of deliberately leaving the toy behind in order to sabotage his visitation. Thereafter, Evan managed to track down the exact same elephant to keep at his place, but Maya would have nothing to do with Ellie 2.0.

For the next fifteen minutes Letty and Maya searched every corner of the small motel room, but to no avail.

“I want her,” Maya sobbed.

Letty tried to remember the last time she’d seen the love-worn stuffed elephant. And then it came to her—last night, when Maya was curled up with Isabelle outside on the breezeway. Maybe Maya had dropped the toy?

She opened the door, but a gust of wind pulled the knob from her grip and blew it all the way open. “Stay here,” Letty warned her niece, closing the door behind her. Outside, an inch-deep torrent of rain—overflow from a nearby stopped-up gutter—gushed past, carrying leaves and twigs, cigarette butts and a stray coral-colored hibiscus blossom. But there was no sign of the elephant.

Grimacing, she waded out the door and down the breezeway. At the end of the concrete walk she spotted a telltale lump of gray with a gold-studded red leatherette collar wedged up against a large plastic trash bin.

Rainwater streamed from the sodden stuffed animal.

Maya was standing right inside the doorway, sucking her thumb when Letty returned. “Look who I found!” Letty said.

“Gimme,” Maya said, stretching her arms out for her toy.