Police.

Every hospital in three states.

I never stopped.

Long after everyone told me to stop, I never stopped hoping.” He reached up, slowly, and touched the edge of the necklace where it lay against her collarbone, just above the old scar, and his whole face crumpled.

She would learn the shape of those ten years later, in pieces, from Millicent — how her father had turned the search into the second occupation of his life, running it alongside the company with the same relentlessness.

How he had kept a room in the house exactly as it had been, a nursery frozen at the age of a child who would have been growing, because to change it was to admit she was gone.