The call ended.

Lily had gone pale. She knew the voice.

I pulled into the brightly lit lot of a busy pharmacy and parked near the entrance. I asked Emma to put on her headphones, then turned around in my seat.

“You never have to keep a secret that makes you afraid,” I told Lily. “Whatever happened, you did nothing wrong.”

She began crying, almost silently. I climbed into the back and held her.

Eventually she told me that Sarah had taken her to a building that looked like a medical office, two days earlier. She’d been given medicine. She remembered waking up in a white room with the bandage on her back.