Dad looked baffled at Mom’s reaction to the car seat, but it wasn’t about the car seat. It was about putting Shiloh down. She hadn’t put her down yet, not even when she slept, and she’d only given her to the nurses because she had to, but I’d watched how hard it was for her every time she did.

I walked to the other side of the car and opened the door. I reached for the seat belt and pulled it across Mom and Shiloh. “I’m sure this is fine. There was a time when nobody rode in car seats, and they all survived.”

Relief washed over Dad, and he took his spot in the driver’s seat next to Meredith. He’d insisted on driving this time. At least that felt normal. I climbed into the back seat with Mom.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“You’re welcome,” I said, trying to look at her without making direct eye contact. I didn’t like looking at her directly because most of the time she started crying whenever I did. I’d never seen someone look so sad—grief carved into every line in her face. Or anxious. She always looked like she was getting ready to crawl out of her skin. Did they test her blood for drugs when they took it?

Drugs were always one of the possibilities discussed in her thread on the Vanished forum. I’d stumbled on the website in middle school, and it had been filled with missing person cases like Mom’s—the kinds of cases where the person disappeared into thin air, and there was never any sign of foul play or anything amiss. They were just gone. Just like her.

There were hundreds of threads, and sometimes I browsed through them to read other people’s stories, but mostly I focused on Mom. She had a huge fan club of people devoted to solving her case. Dad despised all of them—said they were all quacks—but I liked their postings. They really knew her. They discovered things about her that Dad didn’t tell me, like how she’d gotten a misdemeanor for shoplifting when she was twenty or that she’d almost been held back in tenth grade because she failed advanced algebra. I’d always wondered why I sucked at math when Dad was so good at it and had secretly hoped it was something that I’d gotten from her. I never would’ve known that if I wasn’t on the boards.

The members gave me new perspectives and went down roads Dad wasn’t willing to go on. The consensus was that she’d had an affair and run off to be with her lover, which was why Dad felt the way he did about them. He was more likely to entertain the idea that she’d been abducted by aliens than he was that she’d been having an affair. He insisted she was happy, that their marriage was stable, and life was good. He always said the same thing whenever he was questioned. His story never wavered. Most people pitied him and took her happiness as the major piece of evidence proving she was having an affair, because no one believed anyone could be that happy with someone they’d been married to for that long.