Each hour that passed without a single word from him was a small piece of evidence, laid down in a case I had not consciously decided to build yet, but was building all the same.

A man who leaves in a moment of panic might come to his senses on the drive to his mother’s and turn around, or call, or at least text from her guest room at three in the morning to ask whether his daughter was all right.

That text would have meant something.

I would have held onto it.

But it never came, and its not-coming was itself a kind of message, steady and unmistakable, arriving hour after hour in the form of a silent screen.

He was not panicking and recovering.