So I stayed. God help me, I stayed. But I didn’t remain entirely passive.
So I stayed. God help me, I stayed.
For weeks I chased ghosts. Contacted every friend Piper had ever mentioned. Called shelters two states over, hospitals, anyone who might know anything. I filed a missing persons report with Detective Marsh, who was kind and honest and didn’t lie to me about the odds.
“She’s an adult, ma’am. If she doesn’t want to be found, there’s only so much we can do.”
“She wouldn’t do this. Not without telling me.”
“I hear you. I’ll keep the file open.”
Her phone went silent entirely in the third week, after hundreds of unanswered calls. That was the part that finished something inside me. It was as if my only child had fallen off the face of the earth.
One evening, I made myself ask. “Dalton. The account my dad left for Piper’s college. Is it still there?”
He didn’t look up or tense. Didn’t do anything a guilty man does. “It’s fine, Dee. I moved it into a CD a few months back. For safekeeping. Piper’s eighteen, Delia. Your father wouldn’t have wanted her burning through it on some boyfriend. I put it under my name so it’s protected until she’s ready.”
I put it under my name so it’s protected.
“Under your name?”
“Paperwork’s in the briefcase. I’ll show you in the morning.”
He did, too — a printed statement, letterhead I half recognized, a balance that looked about right from what I remembered. “See? Same money. Better shelter.”
“Okay,” I said. I hated that I said okay. Said it anyway because I was so tired I could barely see the numbers on the page.
Franny caught me crying in the break room a week later. Pulled the door shut, sat on the corner of the table. “Delia. You can stay with me. My couch pulls out. No questions.”
“I can’t leave the house. What if my daughter comes back and I’m not there?”
She didn’t argue with me. Just squeezed my wrist. “The offer doesn’t expire.”
The offer doesn’t expire.
I almost told her about the account, about the strange way Dalton had answered with no pause at all. I almost told her I’d been thinking of calling my dad’s old attorney, Elden, who’d retired somewhere out west years ago.
Instead I thanked her and went back to my desk.
That night I stood in Piper’s doorway, staring at the shape of her bed in the dark. “I’ll find you, baby,” I whispered. “I promise I’ll find you.” I didn’t know if I was lying. I didn’t know if the woman making that promise still had anything left in her to keep it.
I only knew the calendar on the fridge kept turning, and every square was another day my daughter hadn’t come home.
Part Three: The Knock
A year passed the way water passes through a cracked bowl. Slowly, all at once, then gone. I still called Piper’s number every Sunday night. It rang once and died. Dalton grew more at ease in the house, the way a cat gets comfortable in a chair it’s decided to own outright.
“You’d be nowhere without this roof, Delia,” he said one night, cutting into his steak. “Remember that.”
