I stared at the back of Dad’s head. The long hairs on his neck had curled from sweat, like they did when he worked out. Only this time it was nerves. He sat in the passenger seat while Meredith drove, nervously bouncing his right leg. She had insisted on driving, and normally Dad would’ve put up a fight, but he hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t said much since they’d broken the news to me.

I had known something was wrong from the minute they had walked into my room without knocking. Dad always knocked first. Meredith had been practically holding him up from behind and pushing him through the doorway. Her hands were shaking, and her face was pale, but she looked good in comparison to him. His pupils were huge, so big they had overtaken the green of his eyes, and he held them open like he’d forgotten how to blink. I’d never seen him so wrecked. I jumped up from my bed, where I’d been working on my science homework.

“Dad, what’s wrong?” I stood in front of him, but he looked past me like he wasn’t seeing me, and he gazed out the window behind my desk like there was something important outside that he needed to see. “Dad?”

“I . . . it’s . . .” His Adam’s apple moved up and down as he wrestled with his emotions. His face was ashen and slick with sweat. “If we . . .”

Was he having a heart attack? A stroke? Why were they wasting time talking to me if something was wrong with him?

“What’s happening?” I turned to Meredith. “What’s going on, Meredith?”

“We just received some very shocking news.” Her voice caught as she spoke. “Why don’t we all take a minute and sit down on your bed?”

Maybe it was Caleb. Or Thad. Wouldn’t they have texted me, though? But Meredith would have been in worse shape if something had happened to one of her sons, and she had been the one helping Dad to the bed like he had been injured, so it had to be him. Something was wrong with Dad. My worst fear was coming true. It’d been my greatest fear since I’d lost Mom—losing Dad. Anxiety rushed through me. I tried to steady my breath, pressing my toes against my shoes to stay present, like my therapist had taught me all those years ago. I sat next to him, twisting my hands on my lap and waiting for one of them to speak.

“Scott, you need to let Abbi know what’s going on.” Meredith cut into my panic.

Dad turned to me, his pupils still huge. He worked his jaw as he spoke. “They found your mother.”

Mom.

I flattened into the bed like a balloon losing all its air. My limbs felt like they were coming loose. “Is she . . . is she . . .”

“She’s alive,” Dad said.

I didn’t catch much of what he said after—something about Montana—because my head was spinning with hamster-wheel thoughts. Now, as we sped down the highway, it was still spinning as I replayed my memories and tried to imagine how Dad felt. It’d been eleven years since Mom had gone missing from the Target parking lot. She’d disappeared like a ghost, with her keys in the ignition and her purse on the passenger seat—no sign of a struggle.