I was sitting in a plastic chair in a fifth-grade classroom being told that my ten-year-old daughter was bright, withdrawn, and had recently seemed anxious.

Sophie was ten in October 2019. She had the phone in her dresser drawer.

I want to say something about the unknown numbers, because I need it written down.

By 2019 I had been the woman from the news for three years. Do you know what that does to a phone number? I got psychics. I got two podcasters, one of whom was genuinely decent and one of whom was not.

I got a man who called at 2 a.m. from a blocked line and said he’d seen my boys at a truck stop in Missouri and then asked whether I had a PayPal. I got a woman who wanted three hundred dollars for a reading.

I got kids. I got a man who called eleven times in one night and breathed.