“What sign?”

Ray’s face changed. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, hell, Daniel, I’m sorry. I figured you knew.”

Daniel drove out at seven that evening in the rain and parked in the tire shop lot and looked up at his daughter.

He had not seen the photograph in a long time. He had made a specific and successful effort not to. It lived in the world — it had been on a magazine cover in 2022, it was in the opening ninety seconds of a documentary he had refused to watch, it turned up if you searched her name and it turned up if you searched other things too — but he had built a life in which he did not look at it, and he had assumed that was the same as it being over.

It was strange, standing in a wet parking lot, to see how young she looked.

He had been in the room. He had watched them take the tube out at 5:19. He had stood at the foot of the bed at 6:14 with his phone in his hand, thinking one thought only, which was: if they see her, they’ll come.