“But don’t you find memories where they happened? If we don’t know where she went, how would you even know where to look?”

“I know where we could start.”

Zadie hadn’t been back to their childhood home since the day Finn and she had moved out. Sometimes she thought about its red shutters, the way the pipes clicked when the hot water was running, the screen door that snapped shut like a mousetrap every time you went outside. She tried not to think about the time their mom had made a sprinkler for them in the backyard by poking holes in an old hose, or the time they’d tried to make a cake for Finn’s ninth birthday and ended up with something that tasted good but was definitely not cake. She didn’t need a gift like Finn’s to know that their old house was full of memories. That’s why she’d elected to stay as far away from it as possible, even moving an hour away so that she never had to accidentally drive past it.

“Nope. Nuh-uh. I’m not going back there.”

“But it’s just down the street—”

“No.”

“Fine. You don’t have to, but hear me out,” Finn insisted. “Let’s say I find another memory. We might be able to retrace her steps. If we can retrace her steps, then we might find more memories. If we find more memories, we might find her. Make sense?”

“Yes, but”—whether or not it made sense was not the issue—“what about Steve and Kathy? I don’t think they’ll be wild about the idea.”

“They think we’re going on vacation, anyway. They wouldn’t need to know.”

And in an instant, Zadie’s beach plans were washed away. She could practically see the tide dragging her romance novels out to sea. “So you want to cancel our beach vacation to go looking for Mom?” she said, measured, trying not to let her disappointment crack open like an egg and run all over the floor.

Finn must not have known how much this trip meant to Zadie, or she wouldn’t have said what she said next. “The beach would be fun, but, I mean, this is more important, right?”

Who’s more important than the mother who abandoned you? How about the sister who didn’t? Five years had passed since Nora’s disappearance, and yet her mom had still managed to find a way to intrude on their lives. Zadie didn’t just want Nora in her rearview mirror, she wanted to smash the mirror into a thousand tiny shards. She wished that Finn understood how she felt. But instead of telling her, she did what she usually did when she felt hurt: she lied. “Sure, it’s important. But what if she doesn’t want to be found. Have you considered that?”