Scott nodded his head eagerly. “Of course. I’ll do anything that helps figure out who took her.” He pointed at me. “Meredith will, too, and I’ll be sure to let Abbi know.”

“What about the baby? Is she okay?” I asked.

They’d told us the baby was a girl, but they didn’t know much more than that. Nobody knew her name, and Kate wasn’t talking. She hadn’t said anything since they’d brought her into the hospital. They had sedated her in the ambulance because she had freaked out when they’d closed the ambulance doors and had tried to jump out. She’d been mute ever since. The medicine hadn’t just calmed her down—it’d turned her off.

A doctor leaning against the wall stepped forward, as if on cue. “The baby has been thoroughly evaluated by our staff of qualified pediatricians, and except for minor dehydration and a few scratches, she appears totally healthy.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. I glanced at Scott to see his reaction. So far, he hadn’t mentioned the baby once. He didn’t miss a beat.

“Can we see Kate now?” he asked.

Marcos nodded. “I want to warn you about her condition, though. We don’t know what she went through yet, but her body tells us she’s been through a lot. Her time away has aged her significantly. Wherever she lived and whatever she went through, it was rough.”

Scott squeezed my hand underneath the table. “We can handle it,” he said.

FIVE

ABBI

NOW

Dad knelt in front of me. He and Meredith had been the last ones to file out of the room. Everyone else had left, except for Marcos.

“Why don’t you tell her about what we warned you about?” Marcos towered above us. He reminded me of the varsity football guys at my high school, with his broad shoulders and bulging chest. I could tell he didn’t have kids by the way my presence made him uncomfortable.

Dad put his arm around my shoulders. His eyes were wet. “Mom has been through a lot, and it’s going to take her some time to recover. She is going to look very different than you remember, so I want you to be prepared when you see her.”

Dad knew more about me than most dads ever knew about their teenage daughters. Probably more than he wanted to, like my bra size and the brand of tampons I used, since I told him almost everything, but one thing I’d never told him was how little I remembered about Mom. It would break his heart worse than it’d already been broken, and I couldn’t do that to him, but my childhood memories were filled with his face instead of hers. My memories of Mom were more of a feeling—a time in space, etched into me in a way that no amount of time could erase. But they were just pieces. Very small ones.

What I remembered most about Mom was how Dad’s eyes shone with love whenever he talked about her. I had loved going through the things in her closet and listening to his stories about her as he fingered the fabric of her favorite dresses, like he was telling me the world’s most important fairy tale—how they’d been best friends when they were kids and had thrilled everyone when they had gotten together as teenagers. I never wanted to dress up as Cinderella or Snow White, because Mom had been my favorite princess. Over the years, Dad had snapped hundreds of pictures of me in her dresses. Our favorite picture was the one where I stomped through the kitchen in her wedding dress, wearing too-big cowboy boots and balancing an Easter hat on my head. And then one day I just stopped wearing her clothes. Why did I quit wearing her clothes? Was it the same day I stopped believing in princesses and fairy tales?