The disguise had been good.

The dyed hair, the hunched posture, the averted face, the oversized clothes hanging off a starved frame — Radley had erased Sidonie so thoroughly that her own father had needed two clues most people would never have noticed.

But that was the thing about a parent, Ellard understood, weeping over a laptop in a parked car: you do not know your child by her hair or her clothes or even her face, exactly.

You know her by the small involuntary things that were there before language, the tilt of a head when she’s frightened, the particular way her hands rest — the grammar of a body you watched come into the world and grow.

They can dye the hair and starve the body and dim the light.

They cannot reach the things you learned about her before she could speak.