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When Livia arrived home Friday night, her parents were thrilled to see her.

They were anxious to hear about her first months of fellowship.

Livia handled a battery of questions and apologized for how busy she had been, and for being out of touch lately.

What she couldn’t tell them was that her forensics fellowship offered very manageable hours and was, in fact, one of the best lifestyle choices in medicine.

The truth was that she had never been so busy that she couldn’t return home.

But the excuse of a hectic schedule was an easy lie, and her parents never questioned her long absence.

Either they were oblivious to the fact that Livia had trouble walking through the door of her childhood home because it reminded her so much of her younger sister, or they knew damn well the trouble she was having and gave her a pass.

In this first year since losing Nicole, they all suffered from the same feelings of inadequacy and failure—stuck between needing to do something every minute of the day to prove they hadn’t given up, and allowing themselves to let go so they could move on.

Whichever it was, ignorance or a free pass, Friday night’s impromptu visit was spent discussing her new life as a forensics fellow and never touched on her absence over the past year.

None of Livia’s concerns or suspicions about Casey Delevan came to fruition Friday night.

Having aged greatly in the last year, her parents shouldered the heavy burden of their missing daughter, and it would be unfair for Livia to present any of these developments before meaning could be assigned to them.

Before bed, Livia had ducked her head into her parents’ room. They sat up in bed reading the way she always remembered them doing as a child. She wished them both good night and, backing out of the doorway, noticed Megan McDonald’s book on her mother’s nightstand.

She sat now in the dark hours of night when sleep would not come, and watched that red ceiling fan spin and soothe her sweaty skin.

Her parents had never believed in air-conditioning, and Livia carried memories of her and Nicole sleeping on damp sheets with windows yawning and box fans humming through the night.

Warm Septembers saw her off to school with red cheeks and sweaty strands of stray hair plastered to her forehead.

October now and unseasonably warm, Livia’s bedroom was the same as it had always been.

As the grandfather clock in the downstairs foyer chimed to indicate two hours past midnight, Livia sat up in bed.

The room had not changed since she left for college more than ten years ago.

Pictures of her youth still stood on her dresser, and stuffed animals hung in a net in the corner.

Her old beanbag chair where she used to do her homework sat deflated next to the bed.

The room looked like that of a dead child her parents didn’t want to forget.

Nicole’s room next door was the real thing, and Livia sensed why she hated coming home.

At her old desk, Livia pulled out her MacBook and sat in the subtle glow of the screen.

She typed Megan McDonald into the search engine and found thousands of hits.

She pulled up articles from 2016 when Megan and Nicole went missing.

The stories exhaustively covered Megan’s background.

Her shining future was known to the world.

The reporters loved that such an all-American girl had been kidnapped.

It made for great reading, how such a smart young girl had outfoxed her abductor, escaped from the unsettling bunker the entire country got to know so well through pictures and tours on the morning talk shows, whose journalists had all converged onto the small town of Emerson Bay.

Livia found a video of Dante Campbell clambering out of the bunker in a skirt and high heels and looking like a complete fool.

The country fell in love with Megan McDonald.

She was the girl who made it home. Megan became a star.

She was the brightest of Emerson Bay High, and after the abduction she was the doll of the country.

That Nicole Cutty was also a part of the story was only news initially.

That Nicole’s abandoned car was found down the road from the beach party where both the girls had gone missing was only newsworthy until Megan McDonald resurfaced.

Megan’s stunning return home and heroic escape overshadowed everything else.

Eclipsed the fact that Nicole was still gone.

As Livia sat in her childhood bedroom, she realized how much had changed in the last year, and how much had stayed the same. Her room. Her parents’ love of humid, stuffy homes. And Livia’s unwavering guilt that during her sister’s time of need, she had turned her back on Nicole.

Livia typed the name Casey Delevan into the search engine and hoped for more luck than she had earlier in the day.

Mr. Delevan was a twenty-five-year-old construction worker reported missing by his landlord in November of 2016.

Estranged from his mother, and with an MIA father, he had no family looking for him and no one who ever knew he was gone.

The article stated that Casey Delevan’s mother lived in a town outside of Atlanta called Burlington.

Livia checked the map. I-95 to I-20, about eight hours.

The drive looked easy. A straight shot and a good place to start.