Her mother shushed her back to bed, saying that would be the end of it, but Mira couldn’t let it go, not that night or the night after, and so when the morning came she snuck out of the house and boarded three buses to get downtown to the police station. It took her a half hour to muster the nerve to go inside, circling around the block, walking slowly, hoping when she got to the entrance she’d be ready. She repeated the story in her head, each time hearing her mother’s scolding. “No one believes women like us,” she’d said. “We’re women and we’re black, you think anyone’s going to listen to you? You think anyone’s gonna hear? We’ve always been nothing. We’re never gonna be seen.”

Her mother was right. Black girls like her had always been invisible. All Mira had to do was think about the stories of black girls gone, decades of the daughters of their neighbors, daughters of her mother’s friends, having disappeared from their own streets as they made their way home from school, from work, from their friends’ houses. Their cases were ignored by police and so the family members who cared took it upon themselves to try—plastering photographs on the trunks of neighborhood trees, cluttering the walls of the post office and the grocery store with Missing! signs. Girls, barely teenagers, were here and then they weren’t, disappeared into oblivion with no one knowing where they could have gone. For black girls, terrors lurked everywhere. Up in New Bern three black women were found chained in a basement. There for almost a decade until one of them escaped. Neighbors saw her as she ran down their neighborhood streets, half-naked, what clothes she wore were rags. They saw her crying out and closed their blinds and locked their doors, and out of their own fear they ignored her as she ran for help until finally, someone with the sense to ask what was wrong found her and called the police. The house she’d escaped from wasn’t far from where she’d lived. A few blocks difference between her and home.

Mira walked slowly inside the station. The lady at the front desk gave her a quick glance-over before ignoring her, shifting her attention back to her desk. Mira forced herself to speak up, to enunciate her words, lest they think, she could hear her mother saying, lest they think you belong here.

“Excuse me,” she started. “Can I— I’d like to speak to someone about the Loomis case.”

The woman gave Mira a hard look this time. “You’ll be wanting Sheriff Brody,” she said, and pointed down the hall.