“I believe we’ve found your daughter.”

“Her body?”

“No, ma’am. Her living, breathing person.”

She transfers the phone from one ear to the other. Jack is staring at her with his eyebrows pinched together. “What is it?”

“You’re saying”—Nora clears her throat—“you’re saying she’s alive?”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

She can barely figure out how to make words. “Who is this?”

“Do you happen to know where McChord Field is?”

“The air force base?”

“We’ll have a helicopter waiting for you there in a half hour.”

18

Jack doesn’t want to believe because it hurts so bad when that belief gets torn away. It’s happened over and over again. He will see a reflection in a window, hear a voice in the cereal aisle, spot a messy tangle of hair in a car rushing past him, and feel certain: It’s her. She’s still out there.

Every now and then, somebody would bring up the possibility of a memorial service—his parents or mother-in-law. But neither he nor Nora would accept that kind of finality. There was no body, so there would be no grave.

This impossible moment is why. He tries to imagine what she will look like now—at thirteen—stretched out, bonier, with the knobby knees and sharp elbows of early adolescence. If she had never left, she would probably be a pain in the ass—like all thirteen-year-olds—and spend too much time on her phone and yell about the unfairness of chores and homework and everything else, slamming doors, testing the limits of teenage attitude. But he wouldn’t mind. He’d welcome and love every minute of her eye-rolling disdain for him, and he would comfort her when friendships collapsed, relationships disappointed, and tryouts didn’t go as well as they could have. He would briefly stop applauding to wipe away tears when she eventually walked across the stage to collect her diploma. He would wave at her from the other side of security when she headed off to board a plane for college, probably Pomona, maybe Carleton or Dartmouth. She would become an architect or a director or a lawyer. Maybe a professor like her dad or a cop like her mom. She would find a spouse, and they would have children, maybe two, possibly three, but not just one, because she had been lonely as an only child. And then Jack’s hair would silver, his back would hunch, and his bones would break easily like stems of glass, and eventually he would fall on an icy sidewalk and die, so Mia would be the one missing and imagining the ghost of him everywhere.