There was speculation, of course. She didn’t seem like the type to run away, by all accounts, but teenagers are notorious for keeping their real selves hidden from those who love them best. That’s what the psychologist on the television said. Was she an addict? Did she have a boyfriend nobody knew about, maybe an older man? Did she have secrets?

“What do you think?” Sherri asked Bobby once. “About this missing girl?”

He shook his head regretfully. “Hell of a shame,” he said. He squinted at the photo in the paper she held out to him. “Cute girl,” he said. Then he looked at her quizzically. “Why are you spending so much time on this girl, babe? People go missing all the time. Shit happens.”

Was the seed planted then?

Once, entering a supermarket to buy a carton of orange juice and a tub of the cream cheese Katie liked on her bagels, Sherri found herself face-to-face with a poster that showed a different photo of Madison Miller than what she’d seen in the past, which was a casual family photo in front of an ocean. But now here came a school photo, fall foliage in unnatural shades of red and orange: a background. On the bottom of the poster at the supermarket was a number to call with any information: an FBI tip line. Sherri copied the number on a receipt and shoved the receipt back into her wallet.

She brought the groceries home and toasted a bagel for Katie.

What could she say if she called the FBI? Could she say, “I have a bad feeling about this”? What did she know, for sure? She knew nothing to connect Bobby and the guys with Madison Miller. She knew he had a secret computer, and she knew he engaged in business that was not quite legal. But did that make him a kidnapper? Was a bad feeling a tip? If she called the FBI, their lives would crumble around them.

“They still haven’t found the girl,” she told Bobby later that evening.

He said, “What girl?” But before he said that he paused, and she watched him arrange his face carefully. She watched him reach for the right words.

Was the seed planted then?

After that, she spent hours at her computer, getting lost in what she found. Rabbit hole after rabbit hole. Madison Miller didn’t come back, and she fell out of the news cycle. But there are dark places on the Internet where stories never die, and where they morph into conspiracy theories. Madison Miller was kidnapped to be part of a sex trade operation run by a ring of South Americans. Madison Miller was a drug dealer, a porn star, a Russian operative, a garden-variety runaway.