I stood in my kitchen with the phone against my ear listening to two recorded voices tell me, pleasantly, to leave a message, and I understood from the very fact of their silence that this was not an accident, not a mix-up, not a confused elderly woman wandering off.

People do not both, simultaneously, have their phones off on the afternoon their mother goes missing.

People have their phones off when they do not want to be reached, because they know exactly what has happened and are hoping to be somewhere else when the consequences arrive.

So I got in my car, and I drove a hundred and ninety miles with both hands locked around the wheel.

I will not pretend I understood, on that drive, everything I was driving toward.