“We’re not secretly taking her DNA.”
“I intend to.”
“How?”
“By asking her.”
“She’s fourteen.”
“Exactly.”
For ten years, I would’ve sworn there was nothing I wouldn’t do for an answer.
“She’s fourteen.”
Then I remembered Mia standing on our driveway while four adults discussed her like a puzzle we’d been handed.
“She’s not evidence, Greg.”
“What if Mia says no?”
That question hurt.
I picked up my keys.
“Then we live with it until she’s ready.”
“What if Mia says no?”
I walked next door before fear could change my mind.
Joan opened the door.
“I need to ask Mia whether she wants testing. If she says no, this conversation ends.”
That made Joan step aside.
Mia was sitting on the couch with one leg tucked under her.
“If she says no, this conversation ends.”
Thomas stayed nearby.
I remained standing.
“Do you want to know whether there’s a connection?”
Mia studied me.
“You already think I’m her.”
“I think you might be, honey. But I… I don’t know.”
“You already think I’m her.”
“What’s the difference?”
Then she asked, “If I am Margot, what happens?”
My first thought came immediately: you come home.
I nearly said it.
Instead, I looked around.
Her shoes were kicked beneath a chair.
“If I am Margot, what happens?”
A backpack leaned against the wall.
A framed photo showed her and Joan laughing beside a birthday cake.
This wasn’t temporary.
It was her life.
“We figure it out.”
“Who decides?”
This wasn’t temporary.
“You get a say. In everything.”
Mia’s eyes narrowed.
“You mean that?”
“Yes.”
“Even if you don’t like what I decide?”
“Yes.”
“You get a say. In everything.”
Mia agreed to proper testing.
While we waited, I asked Joan for every early record she had from before Mia came to them.
***
The next evening, Joan carried a folder to our dining table.
“I’ve looked at these a hundred times,” she said.
“Then let’s look again.”
Mia stayed upstairs by choice.
Mia agreed to proper testing.
I respected that.
Halfway through the folder, I found a report describing a young girl discovered asleep near the end of a bus route on the same afternoon Margot disappeared.
I pushed the report toward Greg.
“Margot wouldn’t have gotten on a bus,” he said.
“There was a stop across from our house. But over the years, they stopped using it.”
I respected that.
“She was four, Nicole.”
“She’d ridden it with me.”
I remembered Margot once asking whether buses slept at night.
“She knew that bus, Greg.”
The report said the little girl had apparently boarded with several other passengers and was later found asleep near the end of the route.
“She was four, Nicole.”
