Winnie hadn’t looked through the mail in three days. That wasn’t the only thing she hadn’t done: dishes were stacked around the sink, and there was a load of moldy wet clothes in the washer she’d been too lazy to transfer over to the dryer. Lazy wasn’t the right word, no, she was spent. Meanwhile, she lay awake all night waiting for the dark figure to materialize next to the window so she could shake Nigel awake and prove she wasn’t crazy. There’d been no apparitions after that day, and Winnie had spent a good portion of her nights convincing herself that what she’d seen had been a figure of her imagination. This was an old house, after all. She was standing with her foot propped on the pedal of the garbage can, dumping various store catalogs and flyers inside, when she came across the envelope.

It was the hand-scrawled address that drew her attention. There was no return, just Winnie’s name and address and a stamp.

She ripped it open, and a flurry of paper drifted out, landing across the kitchen floor. Swearing, Winnie knelt to pick up the pieces. They were cut in different-sized rectangles. She held one up to her face and saw that they were printouts of online news stories. The first one read: Baby abducted in supermarket!

The story was of Rosie Jhou, taken from her stroller in the late nineties from a chain grocery store. Winnie remembered the story. As far as she knew, Rosie Jhou had never been found. That would make her over twenty today. But why would someone send Winnie this? She reached for another clipping, this one asking, Where is Karlie Karhoff? in bold across the top. Eight-month-old Karlie Karhoff had last been seen in the nursery of her family’s home in Montana. Her distraught parents said they’d put her to bed the night before, like usual. “She had a cold and was sleepy,” her mother, Hillary Karhoff, told authorities. But to their horror, they found her crib empty the next morning, baby Karlie gone.

Winnie reached for another, this time her stomach in her throat; it was about a missing Detroit girl named Hellie Armstrong. Hellie hadn’t made it to her second birthday party; she was taken from her yard a week shy of it while wearing her yellow Princess Belle dress. Her mother said it was going to be a Disney Princess party. By the time Winnie was finished picking up the pieces of paper, she held over a dozen clippings in her hands, which were shaking so hard she dropped them all over again. She stuffed everything back into the envelope, every child who had never been found, and quickly dropped it into the trash. The lid closed and Winnie placed a hand over her racing heart.