I’ve got her.

I’ve got both of you now.” And my ex-wife, this proud and private woman, put her face in her hands and cried in a way I had never once seen in the years I was married to her — cried like something that had been clenched for three days finally letting go — and I stood there and let her, and did not try to fix it, and understood that whatever we had been to each other before, we were about to become something better: not married, not in love, but bound, permanently, by a child we had both, in our own ways, refused to lose.

I sat with her a long time that night, after the doctors had done their careful work and Maya had finally fallen asleep with a hand in each of ours, and Elena told me things I will not repeat here because they are hers to tell or not.

But she told me one thing I’ll carry.

She said that in the worst of it, in the back of that vehicle not knowing if she would live to morning, the only thing that had kept her from breaking apart entirely was a single stubborn thought, repeated like a prayer: Maya is smart, Maya hid, Maya will be found. She had built her whole survival on faith in our daughter and in the idea that someone, somewhere, would come.

“I kept thinking,” she said, “someone will notice she’s gone.