She got in a car and drove to Granite Bay and she did not contact any of us again until the twenty-second of April 2025, except for a girl of twelve who found her on the internet in 2022 and who she did not turn away.

Part Fourteen: The Notebook

I kept a phone log.

I have to explain this because it sounds unhinged and because for about twelve years I thought it was the most reasonable thing I had ever done.

We had a landline until 2017, because a house with six children and no money has a landline, and because the school needed a number that a child could be handed.

And from the November of 2010, in a spiral notebook that lived on a shelf in the hall, I wrote down every call that came into that house.