We stood in silence then, the only noise coming from the dog chewing a bone under the table.

  “You didn’t report any of this?” I asked in just over a whisper.

  “That? I couldn’t. And really, it was obvious the doctors and your mother weren’t seeing eye to eye by then. She worked in health care and had her own opinions on things. They saw her as an impediment toward your treatment, so I’d take all that with a grain of salt.”

  “I remember. She didn’t like the doctors. Said they weren’t interested in fixing me.”

  “Your mother stopped bringing you to the follow-up appointments. And then there was some talk from other medical professionals that, to hear your mother discuss it, your history of sleepwalking didn’t fit any sort of profile. That she was maybe straining the truth, whether intentional or not.”

  I remembered Dr. Cal saying it would’ve been unusual that a doctor had given me medicine to stop the episodes. Maybe it hadn’t been their idea. Maybe my mother had demanded it. She’d always believed what she needed to believe.

  “Well, look,” Emma continued, “it’s just one thing. And that doctor was sort of a jerk. The more he drank, the more outrageous he became. At one point he said he thought you were lying, too. And that’s when I decided he was an asshole. You were six years old. What child knows how to lie straight-faced to adults like that?”

  “Lying about what?”

  She shook her head. “That you couldn’t remember anything. Not a thing, for three days, until Sean Coleman looked down into that grate and grabbed your wrist.”

  “I really don’t,” I said, and she nodded. Maybe I did back then, but there was no unearthing it now. Just the darkness and the cold, the walls, the stagnant water. I got a chill even now, and took a bite of the sandwich to chase it away.

  “God, I remember that moment so well,” she said. “The moment I saw your arm. Still gives me goose bumps.” One more drink, the level in her cup draining rapidly. How long had this story been living inside Emma Lyons, waiting to come out? “When a story gets to be this big, people come out of the woodwork. People want to tell you things. They want to take people down with their envy. Nathan Coleman was one of them—someone jealous of the opportunities that came after, for you, for your family. Not for him. His father had no interest in the media, and the media didn’t know what to do with him, either. Too quiet, too soft-spoken. He shied from it all. I think Nathan just wanted a piece of what his father declined to be part of.”

  But I was a commodity. Even my mother had treated me as such, wanted to seize the opportunities we had. Nathan should be glad he wasn’t made into a national talking point. He had no idea what his family had avoided. The things people would say about his father. How people would treat him differently if they knew the truth.

  “Other people came forward?” I asked.

  “With money like that in play? Of course. A lot of people were jealous after. Saying your mother hit the lottery. Look, I think if you’ve been through what she had, you deserve it. Took a few years off her life, I’m guessing.”

  “She’s dead,” I said.

  Emma put her glass down on the table. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. What happened?”

  “Overdose.”

  She paced around the table, eyes narrowed at something she saw out in the road. She paused for a moment before shaking her head and continuing. “Can’t say I’m surprised, unfortunately. She’d been let go of several jobs for that reason, as far as we could tell. Those were the other stories we chose not to air. Irrelevant, really. Former employers saying she’d been dismissed.”

  “For what?” I asked. It seemed suddenly, painfully important.

  “Rumors, mostly. A prescription that had gone missing. A forged refill signature. Petty infractions that had nothing to do with you or your rescue.”

  I felt the immediate need to leave. She dropped these facts as afterthoughts, but they were the little things that mattered, that shifted my understanding. Not of what happened in Widow Hills but of my mother. That it wasn’t the media, or even the precipitating event, that had sent my mother down the path of no return. That she had always been this person.

  “She was an addict before it happened?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Maybe. A high-functioning one, if so.”

  “Selling, then.”

  She shrugged, which was my answer. My mother had done whatever she needed to do. She’d survived. Sold a prescription, sold a book, sold my story. Sold our things when the cash ran out.

  “You never dug deeper,” I said. Not accusing, just stating a fact. “With all those little questions?”

  “No. I saw what happened after the ten-year programming. That was bad enough. Imagine if people found out the whole thing was a fraud?”

  The word hung in the air, louder than necessary. It echoed off the walls, and Emma’s eyes widened, like she wanted to take it back.

  It was the first time she gave voice to the thing I had feared. That this was what Nathan had believed, and the pile of documents was the evidence he’d been accumulating for years. That the story was not at all what it seemed.

  “It would ruin me,” I said. All the people who had watched, and prayed, and dedicated themselves to my safe return.

  “It would ruin all of us, honey,” she whispered.

  “Do you think Nathan Coleman is going to come forward with all of this?”

  “If he does, I’d do the same thing I did ten years ago and ignore it. There’s nothing to corroborate it, so it doesn’t matter.”

  I closed my eyes. “I remember,” I said, and I felt everything in the room stop moving. “Not all of it. But I remember the cold and the dark. I can’t stand enclosed places.”

  She nodded. “Of course,” she said. “And you survived it. So let’s let this go. There’s no good that comes of it now.”

  “Except,” I said, “Sean Coleman is dead.”

  She frowned, and I could see all the questions rising to the surface.

  “He died outside my house. And with everything you told me, it sounds like some people might think I have a pretty good motive.”

  She stepped closer, so close I could smell the vodka on her breath. “Oh, honey, don’t you see? If this is really what it’s about, we all have a motive.” Her cold hands at my elbows, fingers pressing tight. “And if it comes out, we will all fall down.”

  VOICEMAIL TRANSCRIPTS

  AUGUST 27, 2020

  NATHAN COLEMAN

  9:13 A.M.

  I feel we left things in a weird place. Driving by your place and would love to talk. I don’t see your car. Are you at work?

  BENNETT SHAW

  10:03 A.M.

  Hey, listen, I heard what happened with work. Really shitty, seriously. If you need a place to crash and hide out from all this, I’m here. I mean it. I’ve been a crappy friend, Liv. I was upset you never told me. But I get it. I really do, and I don’t care what they’re saying. Okay? Call me back so I know you’re okay either way. I’m at work, but I’ve got my phone on me. I know. Don’t tell.

  MACKENZIE SHAW

  10:45 A.M.

  Hi, Olivia, Mackenzie Shaw returning your call. Sorry, just got your message. This is my cell, please call back as soon as possible.

  CALVIN ROYCE

  10:59 A.M.

  Olivia, this is Cal Royce. You missed our appointment today. I had a call from a detective and she’s coming in later. Please get back to me.

  NATHAN COLEMAN

  11:23 A.M.

  I know you saw. I know you know. Let me explain. It’s not what you think.

  CHAPTER 24

  Thursday, 4:30 p.m.

  THE SIGN FOR WIDOW Hills came up abruptly, before I was ready for it—so unassuming at the edge of the road, blending in with the woods.

  I had to drive another mile, the road slanting upward into a crest, before I saw them: the peaks of the three mountains in the distance, huddling together in a cloud of gray mist.

  My stomach dropped like I was at the top of a ride, about to tumble over. The anticipation before the fall; the fear before the scream.

  As the roads started veering off from the main thoroughfare, I tried to orient myself. Tried to see the little-girl version of me. But it was all imagination and conjecture. There was nothing instinctive about the sloping road into town. I hadn’t been here since I was seven, and nothing looked familiar.

  It had been too long, even, to feel a vague familiarity with the town itself. Even the mountains themselves in the distance, the very landmark that gave Widow Hills its name, I didn’t know whether I remembered it myself or if I was just remembering a photo, a story.

  I remembered newspaper photos and interviews replayed. I remembered that pale yellow house with the gingerbread trim, a photograph of my mother in front of it. The humidity of the hallway; the screen door slamming shut.

  More than this place, I remembered the after.

  The hook-and-eye latch; the medicine; the hot chocolate. The doctors and my mother beside the bed. I remember the operations, the pain, the exercises. The looks.

  Before, there was darkness.

  Before, there were only the stories—the things people told me and the things I’d read. Sometimes I felt I was nothing more than a character brought to life by my mother’s book. A girl who came into this world kicking and screaming. A girl whose mother knew, before her eyes had even shot open, that her daughter was gone. A girl whose mother believed she would survive it.

  She had called us both survivors.

  As I turned onto the street where I’d once lived, I wondered—would I remember when I saw it? Was it possible to unearth a memory from twenty years earlier, to find out what had been worth killing for decades later?

  All the documents Nathan Coleman had been accruing on me flashed in my mind. The interviews, the 911 calls, the excerpts from my mother’s book that he found relevant for some reason. Like he’d spent so much time dedicated to my life, he’d seen something emerging from the background.

  But those details existed in a vacuum. I needed to see it. See, most important, whether I could drag my own memories back to the surface.

  There was nothing to mark the spot as a tourist attraction on a map, though I knew it. On the Internet, you could get a mapped path to the site of Arden’s disappearance and the location of her rescue. For a while after the rescue, I’d heard there were even tours—the commercialization of a trauma.

  Widow Hills had owned its role. Found the help they needed, rescued their own. The town was a survivor, too. It had survived the media attention and then the aftermath, when they all packed up and left. The attention shifting elsewhere as everyone scrambled for relevance.

  I would not have been able to find my old house on my own, without the GPS. I barely even recognized it. Sometime in the passing years, the ranch-style house had been repainted a light gray. The grass was dead. I could hear the screen door banging shut in my memory, though there didn’t seem to be one attached to the entrance anymore.

  Twenty years, and I guess I should’ve been grateful the house was standing at all. I idled my car at the curb; there were no houses across the street, just scattered trees giving way to forest. We were on the outskirts of town. The houses on either side had no cars parked in the driveways. Someone peered out a window just as I was looking, and I kept moving toward the end of the street—the direction I’d headed that night in my sleep.

  I parked my car out of sight of the homes, where the road swerved to the left. This was where I’d been swept away. Off the road, down the embankment, into the wooded area. The trees were sporadic here, not yet the dense forest of the distance. A ditch was cut into the wooded area just off the road. This was where it had happened. The water rising, and rushing, knocking me off my feet. Flowing downstream, over the grass and roots and dirt.

  I’d seen the footage, the reporters walking the audience through the sequence of events, the play-by-play that had led to my disappearance.

  There was a faint path that marked the way to the drainage pipe. Downtrodden by the events leading up to my rescue twenty years ago. Maintained by the curious following the trail. When I arrived at the access point, the grate was sealed up. There was nothing to mark what had once happened here—this was not where I had been found but where I’d been lost. And yet this was the site most visited. It was more iconic, the image shown over and over beside the photo of my green sneaker, stuck in the edge of the torn-away grate.

  I imagined those moments of hope; hoping it held, before my foot gave way, leaving the shoe behind.

  I must’ve been awake. The memory buried while I’d dissociated. While I’d been swept into the pipes—just small enough—lost to the darkness. The terrible horror of it.

  On the news, before I was found, reporters had traced the paths I might’ve taken with the map of the pipe system up on the screen. Where I might’ve gotten air. How I might’ve moved from section to section.

  The problem with the pipe system map, I knew from both the articles and my mother’s book, was that it was incomplete. This town had been an old mining area, and a new public works system had been laid on top of a less-well-understood drainage system from the past. There were more access points than the city had record of. Of course, they checked the access points they knew of, over the first couple of days, but I hadn’t been found at any of those.

  After, they said I must’ve found footholds. I must’ve been buoyed by water collecting in a stagnant section. I must’ve found a resting spot and slept at some point.

  I must’ve had the largest dose of luck by my side.

  I must’ve been driven and capable and determined and brave.

  I must’ve been a miracle.

  So many things had to line up for me to survive, skirting the realm of believability. But that was what made the story.

  But standing here now, I felt nothing.

  The spot where I was found was closer to the river, in an unmarked access point that predated the current system. That’s where my mother believed I’d held on for days, waiting to be found, until Sean Coleman reached out and grabbed my wrist. There, I hoped, was the place I might actually remember something.

  I walked back to my car and looped around the outside of town, following the Internet’s directions on where to park, where to walk. It was less marked but functioned as a path all the same.

  I’d seen Emma Lyons do it. All the reporters, in a bustle of activity, set up with their camera gear.

  Now there was nothing but crickets and birds periodically calling in the late afternoon, the wind moving through the trees, the occasional animal scurrying through the bushes.

  This was the same path Sean Coleman must’ve been following the night he found me, heading back to his car. In that rare interview he’d given, he said he’d parked outside the town center and was making his way back from the search when he saw my hand.

  I knew it as soon as I was upon it. The clearing with the grate in the middle. Tall weeds growing up and over where the old plaque must still be, beside the grate. I stood in the spot where Emma Lyons once stood, pointing out the activity in the center. Where she could see Sean Coleman holding on to me. My arm, proof of life.

  During the rescue, they ended up coming at me from the side, to keep the equipment away from my face. The lid was secured and welded shut, and no one wanted to drill next to my head. They dug down beside it instead, then drilled through the concrete tubing, until they could remove me that way.

  I walked to the clearing, once blocked off by the perimeter to hold back the media and onlookers.

  Twenty years later, and both the grate and the hole they’d dug were resecured.

  I used my sneaker to brush aside the tall weeds, a layer of dirt dulling the words of the plaque:

  In honor of the good people of Widow Hills

  To commemorate the rescue of Arden Maynor

  I stepped closer, peering into the grate. Could hear a steady drip of water, something faintly flowing in the distance. Close enough now to feel a whoosh of chilled air, hear a hollow echo. I closed my eyes, like I could feel the precursor to panic settling in.

  It was a feeling like disorientation, like staring into that empty box—like I was looking for something, desperately, that did not exist.

  I knelt down, closed my hands around the grates, felt the cold biting into my palms. Staring down, I saw only darkness. I shone my phone light into the abyss so I could see the bottom. The sloped walls and the stagnant water. The ledge. The input pipe from another section. I imagined myself crawling, or forced through, emerging with a sudden burst of air. Rising up with the water and reaching out my hand.

  I pressed my face closer to the grates, trying to see; breathing it in, in all its horror.

  I closed my eyes, straining to remember, but there was only the emptiness. A black hole in place of a memory—but something pulling me closer, closer.

  I opened my eyes to darkness—a shadow, like a cloud had moved across the sun.

  All the hairs rising on the back of my neck, across my arms, my hands tightening on the grate. Grass crunching behind me.

  “Don’t be scared.” The deep timbre of his voice, so calm and assured.

  I turned slowly, making sure to stand at the same time. To reach my hand into my pocket and grip my keys.

  “Are you wondering how you got in there?” he asked. He wore jeans and that bomber jacket, sunglasses on top of his head so I could see his eyes, narrowed, searching.

  “What are you doing here?” Though it was obvious. How he’d followed me, found me. He’d been stalking me.

  And now he had me, all alone.

  Nathan stepped carefully, leaves crunching beneath his feet. “I’m trying to figure out how much you really know. I read that article that called you a gifted liar.”

  “I don’t remember anything,” I said, stepping back. Phone in my back pocket; keys in my grip. Counting my exits: path to the car or run deeper into the woods—