PROLOGUE
AMY
My eyelids peel open slowly, moving across my irises like sandpaper on wood. I swallow, a
metallic taste sours my mouth, the surface beneath me is unfamiliar. It’s not the therapeutic
mattress that contours around my spine that I’m used to. My body aches. I shiver and shift, my
back crying out in pain against the hard and unforgiving surface. My skin is cold, and not in the
way that is caused by the bedroom fan I require every night. It’s a stale, dry cold, the silence
surrounding me steady. No, there is no whirring fan, there are no Egyptian cotton sheets against
my skin, no down comforter molded around me.
I blink, allowing my vision to settle into place, and that’s when reality hits like a boulder sinking
to the bottom of the ocean. I’m not home.
1
My mother is missing. Or at least that is what my dad suspects. She left the house she shares
with my father yesterday morning and never returned home last night. My guess is that she got
caught up in her latest novel, fell asleep hunched over her laptop, immersed in the heads of her
characters while she was at her writing house. This is nothing new. A brilliant writer, but a semi-
absent parent and wife.
My phone buzzes on the passenger seat. Dad’s calling again. I’m tempted to press the round
red circle, avoiding another panicked call until I have more answers. “Hey, Dad, I just got here.”
“You haven’t gone in yet?” He shoots back, fear clinging to his words.
“No.” My eyes assess the house in front of me, a modest white stucco home that my mother
purchased shortly before Christmas. She needed a place to write. A place that wasn’t the
childhood home I grew up in, a place only she could come to, away from distractions. I’d
questioned why she didn’t choose some remote cabin in the woods, like every other mystery
author, but she said she had to be somewhat close to society. It was how she kept herself
inspired.
“I’ll call you back, Dad...I’m sure she’s fine,” I say, and before he can respond I hang up.
My mother’s pen name is Amy Willows, not a far cry from her married name, Amy Quinlan. She
is the opposite of what most people imagine as a highly successful writer. People expect
bestselling authors to wear their brilliance like armor— dark clothes, sharper stares, a visible
edge. But my mother hides her genius behind soft smiles and plain white shirts, as if concealing
something deeper—something unsettling—just beneath the surface. If you didn’t know her, you
might think she was hiding a secret.
The heat beats down through the open window, warming my sleeveless arms. The garage door
at the house next door to Mom’s squeals and rises. The neighbor, a young Mexican woman,
juggles a car seat and diaper bag. A chubby toddler tugs on her shirt, and I overhear an
exchange in Spanish.
I rise from the driver’s side and stretch, the standstill of traffic on the way here did a number on
my legs and lower back. My only hope is that the story I was covering on a local, big-named
surfer will be a boost in my career. I’ll take anything at this point.
I push the spare key in the front knob. “Hey, Mom!” I warn her with a greeting as soon as I set
foot in the entryway and kick off my flip-flops. A gust of cold air hits me. It’s in the mid- seventies
outside. Certainly not scorching for California standards, but my mother’s blood has always run
warmer than mine and she keeps her air conditioner circulating frozen air in what we’ve deemed
as her “writing house,” from March to October.
I make my way toward the room she’d made into an office. The cool tiled floor feels good on my
feet, the only thing on my body that seems to sweat.
When my mother purchased the home, I convinced her to hire a decorator so it would feel like
her own place. It took some persuading, but she soon discovered that she meshed well with the
Spanish style; she handed her credit card over to a decorator who filled the house with navy
blue and yellow mosaic-tiled wall decor, gold couches and burnt orange pots filled with indoor
plants.
Different pottery pieces were intentionally placed as center- pieces, accenting the surfaces of
shelves and side tables. A long buffet table is pushed against the wall in the main hallway that
cuts through the ranch. I drop my car keys into the terra cotta bowl that is centered on the table
between a cactus and a stack of decor magazines. My mother has never so much as touched a
decor magazine, let alone purchased one. All her creativity lies in the words that spill from her
mind and onto the page.
I look closer at her name and address typed on a white rectangle in the bottom right corner of
the top magazine. “You subscribed to a magazine, Mom?” I say as I continue to make my way
down the hallway. The sound of a fan confirms there is life in her office ahead. But when I turn
into the room, the spinning of the blades is the only activity. My mother’s desk is tidy, with only a
few pieces of opened mail. “Moooom!” I sing, as I make my way to the back door that leads to a
small yard.
I push the door open, scan the yard for her sunhat bobbing up from behind one of the garden
beds.
Nothing. I slide my phone out of my back pocket and check for new text messages. Nothing.
Nothing from Hunter. Nothing from my mother.
I walk out into the yard. I’m only a few steps in until my feet meet the patio. Some pots I helped
her fill are right where we left them, the bag of soil tipped on its side. “Mom?” I sing again.
I peek around the edge of the patio where the yard ends and a long corridor of earth leads to
the driveway alongside the fence that separates Mom’s property from the neighbors. Two partly
broken-down boxes of Wholesome2Go, a healthy food delivery service, sit beside an
overflowing recycling bin. And then a couple bottles of wine. I step closer. Wait...not a
couple...inside the bin there are more. I crouch lower, counting them. Eight bottles of wine, a
blend of reds and whites. That’s weird. My mother has been a rare-occasion drinker for most of
my life. Sure, every now and then she’ll toast to something celebratory, but she seldom has
more than a glass, even when we are cele- brating the launch of one of her books. Her way of
celebrating is simple. Start the next book.
A door squeals open in the neighboring yard, startling me. I shoot upright, hitting my knee on
the recycle bin. The empty bottles clink, followed by the sound of a man coughing before he
launches into a conversation on his phone. Something about tee times at a golf course.
I move back into the house and that’s when I feel it. A heaviness in my chest. A shortness in my
breath. Something is wrong. A chill climbs up my spine and then runs back down when I hear
several dings in a row. Incoming text alerts. I race toward the sound, my steps fast but cautious.
I arrive at her bedroom door, craning my neck around the corner. A phone lies like a dead
soldier on the mattress, centered between two propped- up pillows, the charger connected and
dangling off the bed like a tail. I take two long steps toward the bed, my head on a swivel.
Slowly, I drop onto the mattress, a squeal ignites from the box spring below, startling me again.
The phone dings several more times. I punch in the pass- code, my mother’s birthdate. For
some reason she’d been fanatical about sharing her passwords and hidden stashes of money
with me in case something was to ever happen. She has always been oddly lackadaisical about
some things and hyper vigilant about others.
Several text alerts fill the bottom of her screen. I scroll through and read the messages, all
inquiring about my mother’s whereabouts. There is one common theme among every contact. I
don’t recognize a single one of them. ...
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