How the investigators had come and gone, each one hopeful at first and then apologetic, until the last of them had sat him down and told him, as kindly as such a thing can be said, that a man has to be allowed to grieve and move on.

How he had thanked that man, and paid him, and then quietly hired another.

Ten years of chasing a ghost across three states, following every rumor of a girl the right age with a burn on her collarbone, and finding, each time, someone else’s daughter.

He had finally stopped the active search not because he believed she was dead — he told her he had never once believed that, not in his deepest heart — but because Millicent had begged him to let the wound close enough that he could function.

And he had spent the twenty years since carrying the half of the necklace against his chest, under his shirt, every single day, the way another man might carry a photograph, waiting for a light he had promised himself would return.

Aracely stood very still, two lives she could not yet reconcile hanging in the air between them — the one she had lived, and the one that had been taken from her before she could remember it.