Their laughter came through the kitchen window.
“Eight! Nine! Ten!”
Margot squealed somewhere outside.
“Eight! Nine! Ten!”
Then everything went quiet.
A few minutes later, Greg rushed through the back door.
“Nicole, Margot’s gone.”
I actually laughed.
“She’s hiding, babe. She’s gotten really good at finding new places.”
“I’m serious.”
“Nicole, Margot’s gone.”
We searched the house, the shed, the yard, and every place a four-year-old could squeeze into.
Greg called her name until his voice was hoarse.
Then I saw the back gate.
It wasn’t wide open.
It was resting against the latch.
“Greg.”
Then I saw the back gate.
He followed my stare.
Across the road was the bus stop I’d used with Margot dozens of times.
Within hours, police, neighbors, and volunteers were searching everywhere.
Posters with Margot’s smiling face appeared everywhere. Weeks became months, and slowly, the calls stopped coming.
Eventually, people stopped saying, “They’ll find her.”
He followed my stare.
They started telling us we needed to keep living.
We finally moved because neither of us could breathe normally in that house.
But I kept searching: in stores, airports, playgrounds.
I counted children automatically in crowded places.
And every year on Margot’s birthday, I wondered what her face would look like now.
Now a 14-year-old girl named Mia lived next door.
But I kept searching.
***
Joan took a breath.
“Thomas got work here, so I started reading about the area before we moved. Schools, neighborhoods, local history. That’s when I found the article.”
“And you saw my daughter?” I asked.
“I saw her photograph. The little girl looked so much like you did at four. The age and timing matched too.”
Joan took a breath.
Thomas stepped closer to Mia.
“We thought it could be coincidence,” he said.
“We were going to get advice once we settled in,” Joan added.
Greg stared at her.
“You waited three weeks?”
“We thought it could be coincidence.”
“We had a photograph,” Thomas said. “We weren’t going to tell Mia she might be a missing child because two little girls looked alike.”
“Then we moved here,” Joan said.
Her eyes met mine.
“And you opened the door.”
Mia cut across all of us.
“And you opened the door.”
“Could everyone stop talking about me like I’m not standing here?”
Silence.
She looked directly at me.
“And my name is Mia.”
The words hurt, not because she’d said them cruelly, but because she hadn’t.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“And my name is Mia.”
Mia watched me carefully.
“Okay,” I added. “Mia.”
Greg pulled me inside moments later.
The door hadn’t even closed before he said, “We need proof.”
“I know.”
“Then we need proof now. A glass, a hair, anything…”
“We need proof.”
“We’re not secretly taking her DNA.”
His face tightened.
“Nicole, that’s our daughter 20 yards away.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Then let’s find out.”
