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“Hey, Jared,” I call out to the driver of the school bus as he opens its folding doors. If I were of sound mind, I would notice the questioning look on his face. But my brain is so frazzled that I can’t see anything, the past hour of overthinking doing nothing but clouding my vision even further.

“Hey, ma’am, no Hannah today…”

I can’t tell if it’s a statement or a question, but either way I can’t compute what he’s saying. I force a deep breath in, willing myself to calm down so I can put his words in the right order, so that they make sense.

“Hey, Mrs. Forbes,” says Olivia, our neighbor’s daughter, as she bounds down the last two stairs of the bus.

“Hey, Olivia, Hannah last off as usual?”

“She’s not on today,” she says, as if it means nothing. “Her aunt picked her up.”

Olivia’s mom gives me a wave from the other side of the street, as a rancid heat infiltrates my bloodstream.

Absurdly, I laugh. “Jared?”

He shrugs his shoulders, but a flicker of alarm momentarily clouds his chubby features. “She’s not on my list for this afternoon’s drop-off.”

“But of course she is,” I say, losing the moisture in my mouth. “She always is.”

Jared shakes his head as he consults the clipboard hanging from the dash. “Nope, she’s not on it.”

“But…” I start, as the turmoil of Zoe’s presence returns to haunt me. The shock, the panic, the terror, has rendered me useless; unable to function at the most basic level. Think, Nicole, think .

Was Hannah going to track and field after school? Have I missed an email inviting her to an afternoon tea to reward her effort grades? Did I prearrange a playdate with one of her friends? I can’t separate the myriad of possibilities that are crowding my brain. All I know is that she most definitely didn’t go home with her aunt. Because she doesn’t have one.

I almost fall over myself as I run back to the house, the adrenaline turning my legs to jelly.

“Brad! Brad!” I scream, even though I know he’s not there.

The house is exactly as I left it, which seems odd when everything else has changed.

As my trembling fingers hover over the phone, I don’t know who to call first. My instinct is Brad, but he’s going to know even less than I do, so I opt for the school office, praying that they can offer a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why an eight-year-old in their care has failed to reach the safety of her mother’s arms.

“Hawkswood Prep,” comes the cheery voice of Miss Santos, the school secretary, who up until now I’d had down as a jobsworth. I so desperately hope she lives up to my expectations.

“Hi, it’s Nicole Forbes here—Hannah’s mom.”

“Oh, hello, Mrs.—”

“Hannah’s not on the bus. She’s supposed to be. Olivia got off, but Hannah didn’t. Jared, the driver, says she wasn’t on the list, but I know she was, because why wouldn’t she be?” It all comes out in a rush of staccato statements.

All she has to do is give a resounding sigh of relief; a reassurance that she’s got this, that she knows exactly where Hannah is… yet there’s nothing but a painful silence. It may only be a couple of seconds, but it tells me everything I need to know.

“Olivia said she’d been picked up by her aunt, but that’s impossible… So, where is she?”

I look around the front room, willing Hannah to burst out of the costumes trunk, ready to recite her favorite lines from Tangled , but her Rapunzel dress lays painfully dormant.

“Mrs. Forbes, we spoke about this last week…” she starts, talking to me as if I’m a forgetful child. “You called to say that Hannah’s aunt would be collecting her from school today.”

What?

“I’m just checking my records,” she says tightly, but there’s an underlying panic that she can’t disguise—as if she already knows she’s screwed up. If time wasn’t of the essence, I would take a warped satisfaction in waiting to be proved right.

“You need to tell me where my daughter is, right now .”

“Ah, here it is,” she says, with a smug tone. Or is it relief? “You called last Wednesday at 11:27 a.m. to give permission for Hannah’s aunt to pick her up—I have it here in my logbook, and I am most particular about these things.”

How does that even make sense?

“Check again,” I snap.

“Mrs. Forbes…”

“Someone has fucked up, so you need to tell me where my daughter is, immediately .”

“Mrs. Forbes, I can assure you…”

I hang up, not needing to hear her empty assurances, and immediately dial Brad’s number.

“Hannah’s gone,” I sob into the phone. “She wasn’t on the bus and the school don’t know where she is. They’re telling me she was collected by your sister…”

“But I don’t have a sister.”

“Exactly! So where is she?”

“I’m calling Hank,” he says, before the line abruptly cuts off.

I pace the kitchen floor as I wait for one or other of them to show up, or at least to ring and tell me how they’re going to find her. But in the meantime, I can’t help but picture where she might be. My imagination takes me into the darkest corners of my mind, and I can hear her calling out for me from a cell-like room. A steel door is holding her against her will and a stained mattress lies ominously in the corner. She knows she’s somewhere she shouldn’t be, her innocence even tricking her into believing she’ll be in trouble for being there, but still she calls out for me, her need to feel safe far greater than how mad I might be.

I torture myself by remembering our trip to the library a couple of weeks ago and her excitement at going off to find a book for us to read. When she didn’t come back within a reasonable time, I’d thought little of it—I’d often find her sitting cross-legged wherever she’d found something of interest, her eagerness to read making her forget that she was supposed to bring it back to me. But as I tracked through the aisles of the children’s section, with no sign of her, my heart grew heavy. I’d quickened my pace, wishing I had X-ray vision to see through the bookshelves to ease my rising anxiety. I knew she was there—where else would she be?—but I had an inherent need to be put out of my misery.

“Hannah?” I’d half whispered, half called out. “Come on out now. Where are you?”

When I reached the end of the bookcase, she’d jumped out. “Boo!” she shrieked excitedly.

“That isn’t funny,” I said.

“ He told me to do it,” she said, dissolving into fits of giggles as Brad sheepishly peered around the shelves. Despite being pleased that he’d surprised us, I couldn’t help but admonish his insensitivity.

“Why would you tell her to do something like that?” I snapped. “I was going out of my mind…”

“We’re in a library,” he said, laughing as he attempted to grab my waist. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

“You never know,” I said curtly.

“I think we’ve got a pretty good idea,” he’d said, smiling at my fearful expression.

But he shouldn’t be so complacent, because I know people can be taken from you when you least expect it. Like now.

Hank’s blue lights puncture the rapidly darkening skies, illuminating a room I hadn’t even realized needed lighting.

“You need to find her,” I sob, as I fall into his fatherly embrace. He may be the police chief of Coronado, but he’s a friend first and foremost, and Hannah’s disappearance will be hurting him almost as much as it’s hurting me. “Something’s happened—I know it has.”

“Let’s not be jumping to any conclusions,” he says, his soothing tone belying his grave expression, which suggests he already has. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

“She’s eight years old, Hank, and someone has deliberately set out to take her.”

“I spoke to Hannah’s teacher on the way over here,” he says, guiding me into the kitchen with a firm hand in the small of my back. “She’s confirmed that a woman did indeed collect her and that she introduced herself as her aunt.”

“Oh my god!” I wail, as I imagine somebody else playing mother to my little girl. “What does she want? Why Hannah?”

As soon as the words are out, I wonder why it’s taken me twenty minutes to ask myself that question when the answer is so glaringly obvious. How had I not made the connection? How, in the maelstrom of emotions that have descended upon my brain since Hannah’s been missing, could I have forgotten the woman at my door? The woman who had even got as far as the hallway under the guise of being someone she wasn’t. The deafening roar in my head renders me speechless.

“Nicole!” calls out Brad as he runs through the open front door and rushes toward me.

I fall into him, my legs giving way as he bears my weight. “Where is she?” I sob.

His bottom lip wavers, but he pulls himself up short before it has a chance to manifest into anything more. Though I know if it wasn’t for me, he’d have been on his knees before he’d even made it through the front door of the house that bears so many hallmarks of his little girl. Her red rain mac hangs redundantly on its hook, her wellies, still caked in mud, stand to attention on the mat. I’d hazard a guess that he can even smell her, and I can’t help but feel strangely envious; her natural sweet scent having already lost itself on me.

“We’ll find her,” he says, looking to Hank for backup, both literally and metaphorically.

An unnerving silence resounds and a guttural sob catches in my chest as children on the other side of the street play on their tricycles in their front yard. It’s a scene that’s played out every day. Except today everything feels different. Instead of seeing the gleaming pink and blue metal frames reflecting the sunset, a dark cloud seems to be casting the longest of shadows, and instead of their little chuckles of delight, all I can hear is my past howling at me.