I stared at him.

“Margaret Sloane.”

His fingers stopped against his watch.

And for the first time since O’Hare, Noah looked genuinely shaken.

PART 2 — MARGARET SLOANE

My mother had been gone for twenty-eight years.

That was the simplest version of the story.

Margaret Sloane left.

I was young.

People around me decided absence was easier to explain than uncertainty.