I take Shannan’s photo out of my jacket pocket feeling sick to my stomach, all the hairs on the back of my neck vibrating. It’s not the coat I’m looking at anymore. The coat doesn’t matter, only the heavy-souled girl who’s wearing it. Her cynicism, her world-weary look. Her bat signal flashing out past her wounds.

Everything Shannan has lived through is here in her eyes—the day her father skipped town and her mother stopped trying, all the fights she heard from her bedroom at night, the sound of a fist against the wall, against her mother’s face. The way she tried to mute it all in the school bathroom, her knees on the tile, some boy’s hand on the back of her neck, pushing too hard. The times she ran and found nothing. Came back and found nothing. Left again. Of course I’m stretching, filling in the blanks. But in another way, it’s no stretch at all, but incredibly familiar.

Shannan isn’t me, or Jenny. She’s not Cameron either, but I can also see how we all line up behind one another, making a version of the same shape in the world. Trying to believe in people or in promises. Trying to be enough. Trying—always trying—to be free somehow. To unfold.

—

I pull the tack from the corkboard, feel the needle prick as it finds the fleshy pad of my thumb, a tightrope feeling coming over me. The number at the bottom of the posting in my hand is his number. A thin piece of paper, trembling in my fingers, everything zeroing to a single pinpoint, a freckle of my own bright blood.

Careful to touch only the bottom portion of the posting so I don’t disturb any valuable fingerprints or sweat residue, I ask one of the cashiers working the register for a large ziplock bag and tuck the posting safely inside before crossing to the pay phone at the back of the café to call the sheriff’s office. Cherilynn Leavitt picks up.

Through her voice, warm and cheerful, the bell keeps ringing. “Hey, Cherilynn,” I manage to say. “It’s Anna Hart. Is Will around?”

“He’s in the field. Want me to get him on the radio for you?”

“No, that’s okay.” My voice sounds glassy. I take a breath. “Listen, can you get me a reverse phone lookup on the fly? I’ll hold.”

“Sure thing,” she says.

As I wait, I’m barely in my body. My thinking is jumbled, nonsensical. Finally Leon Jentz comes on the line.

“Hey, Anna. I have the information you wanted. What’s up?”

“Hard to say yet.” Again, the disembodied feeling, and yet somehow I keep talking. “Just following up on a lead. What did you find?”

“That number is registered to the Mendocino Art Center.”