Chapter 16

Chloe and Emiliewheel their bicycles into the yard through the garden gate and straight into the storage shed. While her mother stows the bikes, Emilie runs up the porch stairs and races into the house, slamming the door behind her. She pauses just long enough to shout, “Hello!” to her father.

Chloe looks up to see him standing at the kitchen window, snipping herbs at the window boxes. His head is bent over the herb pots, an unruly wave of sandy hair falling over his eyes.

She takes her time walking through the sunny backyard, stopping every few steps to bend and inspect the small green shoots in the vegetable and flower gardens. The growing season here is short, and they have to pick hardy varietals. She and Bastian share a love for gardening and embrace the challenge.

She goes into the kitchen and walks over to stand beside him. The flat basket over his arm is filled with rosemary, mint, and basil. She inhales their fragrant scent.

“Making herb salt?”

He glances at her and pauses the podcast player streaming from his phone before answering. “I am. I thought we could roast a chicken.”

“Sounds wonderful.”

“How was the bike ride?”

“We went to the park. The ducks are back.”

He smiles and returns to cutting his herbs. She kisses the side of his neck, inhaling the scent of his aftershave, then turns to walk into the small office space she’s created for herself in the sunny breakfast nook. As she walks away, he hits play to resume the podcast. She glances at the phone and tells herself to leave it be, and she almost does. But when Maisy Farley’s voice floats up from his phone, she can’t help herself.

She turns around. “Bastian?”

His eyes flick up to meet hers. “Yes?”

“Why are you so—?” She doesn’t want to say obsessed. Obsessed is the wrong word. “—intrigued by this missing girl?” She nods toward the phone.

He hits pause again, then rests the shears on the windowsill and turns to give her his full attention.

“I don’t know, Chloe,” he says, his deep voice bemused. “I honestly don’t. But it’s true, I am very invested in the story. More so than last season.”

She hadn’t paid much attention to the last season of The Farley Files. She knows it had something to do with a tech genius who was believed to have committed suicide by jumping from a window. Maisy Farley helped his ex-wife uncover the truth that he had, in fact, been killed.

“Is it because the missing girl is a teenager, and we have a daughter almost her age?”

“That’s part of it,” he says slowly, “but also, it seems so desperately sad that this family has had this question hanging over them for three decades. They suffered this enormous loss, and no one has ever helped them. No one has stepped forward and said, ‘I know what happened to your daughter,’ or ‘I saw your daughter,’ or even ‘here’s your daughter’s body,’” he says softly. “It’s the not knowing. I can’t imagine it.”

She tries to suppress her laugh but fails. A soft, sad chuckle escapes.

“What?”

“I don’t have to imagine it, not knowing,” she tells him. “I know all about not knowing. Not knowing who my parents were, not knowing why they abandoned me.”

She lowers her voice and glances toward the front of the house, where Emilie’s stretched out on the sofa, flipping listlessly through her assigned reading for literature class. Emilie doesn’t know. She knows that her mother doesn’t have any living family, but Chloe and Bastian have never gotten into the details with her. At some point, they’ll have to. But for now, they just surround her with the love of Bastian’s family, frequent trips back to his village, and family vacations with her cadre of cousins. It seems to fill the gap that Chloe can’t fill because she has no idea where she came from.

Bastian studies her gravely, then says, “And maybe that’s part of it, too. I know that you have this absence, this emptiness, and I feel for them because I feel for you.”

She gives him a small smile, holding back her tears. Her husband is remarkably empathetic. It’s what drew her to him. It’s why she loves him. But when it comes to her past, she’s always felt sadder for him than for herself. It upsets him more than it does her. It’s all she’s known. She made her peace with it a long time ago. But he never has.

The first years of their marriage, he spent untold amounts of their limited funds and his even-more limited time away from the restaurant searching for her people, running down leads, trying to find the family who abandoned her. Eventually, she convinced him to stop. It was depleting their resources, and he was getting nowhere. So she supposes it’s harmless for him to channel that energy into this podcaster with the faint southern accent and her search for the teenage girl, the long-missing Heather Ryan.

She exhales. “Okay. I’m going to go wash up, then do a bit of work before dinner.”

She has a freelance web design firm. After she and Bastian married, she took some courses as an extension student and found she had a facility for it. It pays well, and it gives her the freedom to spend time with Emilie and Bastian.

She’s lucky, she thinks, as she boots up her computer. She has a good life, a quiet life, a life she never imagined she could have when she was in the foster system. Unbidden and unwanted, her mind fills with thoughts of Heather Ryan’s family and their endless search for a girl who’s been missing nearly twice as long as she was not. Despite the tragedy of her childhood, she’s more fortunate than those three women still seeking their sister. There’s always someone worse off. It’s something her social worker used to tell her when she was a teenager. Only now does she realize the truth underpinning the platitude.