Dad did his best to be patient as he stood next to me. I could’ve stayed in her arms forever, but I stepped aside so they could have their time. He threw his arms around her, and her small frame disappeared inside his. Their shoulders shook with sobs, and they whispered things to each other that none of us could hear. The nurses looked away, not wanting to intrude on the sacred intimacy of the moment. Meredith moved away from the back wall and came to stand next to me. She put her arm around my shoulders and brought me close to her.

“Welcome home, Kate. We’re glad you’re safe,” she said, wiping away tears.

SIX

MEREDITH

NOW

I glanced into the back seat of the car. This time Abbi really was asleep. She’d fallen asleep almost as soon as we’d left the hospital. Poor thing. She’d cried all the way through the hospital and into the parking lot. “I’m not going to go back to the hotel yet,” I said to Scott. “I’m just going to keep driving around so she can sleep. I’m afraid she’ll wake up if we stop and won’t be able to fall back to sleep. She needs to rest.” I used to do the same thing when my boys were babies and I couldn’t get them to sleep. I’d drive around until they finally crashed and then park with the car running until they woke up.

“Good idea,” he said, nodding.

I made a left on Main Street and slowly drove past the mom-and-pop stores lining each side. My heart ached for Scott and Abbi. Our visit had been cut short by the baby. Scott and Kate had been embracing when the nurses had brought the baby back into the room. Scott had leaped off the bed like it was on fire.

“Shiloh.” Kate’s face had lit up at the sight of her baby. The nurse had handed her to Kate. She had squirmed and rooted for Kate’s breast. Kate had moved her off, but she had come right back. It had gotten uncomfortable fast, since it was clear Shiloh wanted to nurse. Scott had rushed us out of the room without Abbi getting a chance to hug Kate or say a proper goodbye.

“I know Marcos warned us about how different she would look, but he should’ve been more specific,” I said. “I mean, he couldn’t have said, ‘Hey, by the way, she’s going to look like an eighty-year-old woman’? I’m pretty sure that would’ve been helpful for everyone.”

“Maybe he wanted us to be shocked.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows. I have no idea why they do anything that they do. You’re about to see what I told you about all those years ago.”

I’d heard everything about Kate’s case. I knew it as well as if she’d been my own wife—exactly how she’d disappeared from the Target parking lot that day, everything that had been on her list to buy, and where she had left her purse on the front seat of their Toyota. I knew every step of the investigation, each lead they’d discovered, then quickly dismissed. All the traditional and nontraditional things he’d done to find her or at least a promising lead—the psychics, the mystics, and all the weirdos who’d reached out to Scott over the years with stories about their own relatives who’d vanished. There was an entire group of people who believed in a mass abduction conspiracy by the government. They had talked about it on one of those forums Abbi was always on.