The Other Side of Disappearing

by Kate Clayborn

Genres: Siblings; Women's Fiction; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

A novel filled with depth, wit, heart, and a bit of intrigue, from the author who has captivated readers and reviewers alike with her “modern yet timeless” (Kirkus Reviews) storytelling, complex characters, relatable friendships, and emotionally rich romance.

Hairstylist Jess Greene has spent the last decade raising her younger half-sister, Tegan—and keeping a shocking secret. Ever since their reckless mother ran off with a boyfriend she’d known only a few months, Jess has been aware that he’s the same accomplished con man who was the subject of a wildly popular podcast, The Last Con of Lynton Baltimore.

Now thirty-one, Jess didn’t bargain on Tegan eventually piecing together the connection for herself. But Tegan plans to do exactly what Jess has always feared—leave their safe, stable home to search for their mother—and she’ll be accompanied by the prying podcast host and her watchful, handsome producer, Adam Hawkins. Unwilling to let the sister she’s spent so much of her life protecting go it alone, Jess reluctantly joins them.
 
Together, the four make their way across the country, unraveling the mystery of where the couple disappeared to and why. But soon Jess is discovering other things too. Like a renewed sense of vulnerability and curiosity, and a willingness to expand beyond the walls she’s so carefully built. And in Adam, she finds an unexpected connection she didn’t even know was missing, if only she can let go and let him in . . .

“Poignant, observant, tender, and deeply romantic, The Other Side of Disappearing is a
genre-bending triumph. Clayborn takes what she does best and goes deeper, deftly braiding mystery and family drama with an absorbing romance in her trademark lyrical voice. This book is everything; Jess and Adam own my whole heart.” —Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling authors of The True Love Experiment

“Another masterclass in romance. . . . I never disappear into a book the way I do into Clayborn’s.” —Alicia Thompson, bestselling author of Love in the Time of Serial Killers
 

Release date: March 26, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

At first, I think my sister has run away.

I could be forgiven, I think, for the dramatic thought, could be forgiven for jumping to such a conclusion based on nothing more than a silent house, a set of keys missing from the shelf we keep by the front door. It could be something simple, after all: an errand she forgot to tell me she was running, a walk she didn’t text to say she was going on.

It could be something totally simple.

But it’s like I said.

I could be forgiven.

“Teeg?” I call out for the second time, but I know she’s not here.

I can feel she’s not here.

I take a breath through my nose, willing myself to settle, to ignore an old, familiar ache in the pit of my stomach.

It isn’t that, I tell myself firmly, but still, as I move through the kitchen, my eyes dart unconsciously to the small, round table where Tegan and I ate dinner together last night. Where my mom and I used to eat dinner together every night.

There’s no envelope there.

I close my eyes and shake my head.

I could be forgiven for checking.

When I open my eyes again, I’m more settled, more present. It’s like that moment when you come fully back to reality after waking up, startled, from a bad dream. I’m in my bed, you think. That wasn’t real at all. I remember that Tegan and I—despite the strange tension of the last couple of months, despite the big transition both of us are facing—had a great night last night, the best we’ve had in weeks.

There’s no reason there’d be an envelope.

I let out a quiet scoff. It’s private self-deprecation for my anxiety chased by a pang of sadness: not even three months from now, Tegan will be away at college, and I’ll be walking into an empty house every day.

I’d better get used to it.

I clock the empty popcorn bowl and glasses we left on the coffee table last night. I’d fallen asleep on the couch, two-and-a-half episodes in to whatever season of Friends Tegan was currently streaming, and when she’d poked me awake a couple hours later she’d smiled and called me an old lady. I’d laughed and told her I wouldn’t argue, since I could remember the days when Friends was on reruns after I got home from school. I’d waved her away from cleaning up and we’d both shuffled to bed, and before I shut off my light she’d called to me from her room.

“Love you, Jess,” she’d said, and I’d felt a little clutch of emotion gather in my throat. It was good to hear her say it. I’d started to think—what with her sullen, sometimes sharp attitude lately—that maybe she didn’t anymore.

In my bathroom, I find easily what I came all the way back home for, barely five minutes after arriving at work: my best pair of shears, the ones that hardly ever leave my station at the salon. That’d been, really, how last night’s unexpected girls’ night had started: yesterday I was halfway through my day, taking a quick break while a client’s hair was processing, and I’d checked my phone to find two messages from Tegan, a voice note followed by a string of prayer-hands emojis.

“Jessieeeeeeeee,” she’d whined cheerfully, in a way I hadn’t heard her do in forever. In away I’d smiled to realize I’d missed.

“You have got to do something about these ends! It has to be tonight! I won’t be able to stand it! Please, please? I know you hate cutting hair at home but what if!”—she paused dramatically—“I make you your favorite egg sandwich in exchange?”

I texted her back an eye-roll emoji for the begging and a thumbs-up for the request.

The truth was, I would’ve done it without the egg sandwich, which was actually not my favorite anything, but it was the only food Tegan could competently make, and I always made a big deal of praising her for it.

I made a big deal of it last night, too.

I pick up the shears, preparing to tuck them into their sleeve, but then . . .

Then I pause, that anxious, ominous feeling pulsing through me again.

It has to be tonight, she said on her voice note, and I didn’t even think her hair was that desperate for a trim. I’ve never let it get unhealthy looking, not in all the ten years I’ve been taking care of her.

I swallow, drifting out of the bathroom with the shears held loosely in my suddenly clammy palm, snippets of Tegan’s steady stream of cheerful, casual chatter from last night coming back to me. My nail polish color, her new favorite song. How the mail guy talks loudly on his phone every time he walks up the front stoop to our box. Tegan training a new co-worker at the coffee house where she’s worked part-time for the last two summers.

But also:

What time do you work ’til tomorrow?

Have you by any chance seen my laptop sleeve?

I probably won’t see you before you leave for work; I’m totally going to sleep in.

Love you, Jess.

It reminds me of something.

Her bedroom door is open, and I hesitate before I peek in.

I picture an envelope again. This time, left for me on a bed, or a nightstand. Maybe a small desk I saved for and assembled myself.

She wouldn’t, I think. She’s not Mom.

But when I finally gather my courage and look, I could be forgiven for thinking she is.

WHAT’S clear is that she hasn’t gone yet.

First of all, there’s no envelope.

But there is a suitcase on the bed, looking fully packed, still unzipped. There’s Tegan’s faded, worn backpack resting alongside it. There’s her open laptop on that desk I labored over, its screen dark in sleep, its power cord already coiled for storage. That sleeve I told her she could find in the front closet ready beside it.

Maybe she’s written me an email, instead.

For a few seconds, I simply gape at the scene in front of me; I try to make some other sense of it. Maybe it’s some kind of weird practice run for the only trip we have planned for this summer—the one where we’ll get her set up at school.

But even I know a single suitcase and backpack isn’t how a dorm move-in is meant to look.

My phone pings in my back pocket, and I rush to pull it out.

Sorry to bother you, it reads. But your 10:30 showed up early. Should I tell her you’re on your way? Sorry again, I know you’re rushing!!

I blink down at the text from Ellie, who runs the front desk and does shampoos sometimes when we’re shorthanded. She’s twenty years old and she’s only worked at the salon for a month and a half, and the two sorrys are typical. I’m quiet at work—quiet everywhere, really—and I’m pretty sure Ellie thinks that means I don’t like her.

My reply won’t help.

Cancel morning appts, I type out with shaky fingers, pressing send.

Anyone else, I know, would add something. An explanation, an apology. Family emergency, anyone else might say, to make sure everyone knew it was serious.

But I haven’t been anyone else in ten years.

And no one gets to know about my emergencies.

I navigate to my text box with Tegan, but before I send out a panicky Where are you? I pause and swipe to my email instead.

Just to make sure there’s not an envelope waiting for me there.

What loads, though, is the usual—a notification about auto-payment on the electric bill, a promise for the sale of the season at a place where I haven’t shopped in years, a reminder from one of my streamers that I still have episodes left on a mediocre medical drama I gave up on a few weeks ago.

My heart is pounding in my ears.

Or . . . is that not my heart?

I press send on my text to Tegan as I move toward the sound of knocking at the front door, and like so many other things I’ve come across this morning, it could be nothing; it could be totally innocuous. An inconveniently timed delivery or a sales pitch for faster internet service.

But I don’t really know if I’m really in this morning. Instead my brain is a hot stew of a Sunday night when I was twelve years old and a Saturday afternoon when I was twenty-one. My head is full of the steam it lets off.

Tegan left, too, that steam whispers, even as I unlock the door. Everything you did, all the attention you paid. You missed it happening again.

I know deep down that whatever is waiting for me on the other side of the door will somehow have something to do with that laptop, that backpack, that open suitcase on the bed.

I just don’t expect it to be a giant.

I gape at the man who seems to take up the entirety of my front porch, my stewy brain slow to process the sheer size of him, broad and muscular. Maybe that’s why I take in his face, first: sandy-blond-stubbled and unsmiling, his jaw sharp-edged and his brow lowered in confusion. His green eyes narrow as they take me in.

He has to be at least six-five. He looks like he throws truck tires for recreation. Like maybe he throws the trucks themselves. I have never seen a man this built in real life.

But his voice is unexpectedly high-pitched.

“Hi! We’re looking for Jess Greene?”

“What?” I say, blinking at him.

That’s when I realize his voice is not, in fact, high-pitched. Or at least I don’t know if it is, because he has not actually spoken.

He’s not alone.

Beside him—I could be forgiven for missing her—is a middle-aged woman whose head barely reaches the top of the giant’s elbow. She has a mass of silver-brown curls and she is wearing black-framed glasses that are competing for size with her companion’s massive biceps.

I cannot imagine—head full of steam or not—what these two people have to do with Tegan.

Or wait. With me.

I’m the one narrowing my eyes now, at the woman in the glasses.

“Who’s asking?”

The giant shifts on his feet. The woman smiles. My phone pings in my hand.

Tegan, I think immediately, and look down at it. But it’s only Ellie again. Okay, sorry!!! she’s typed, and I recognize it’s unfair, but I’m so irritated that she’s gotten my hopes up for a reply from my sister that my fingers tighten around the phone in frustration.

I think the woman has started to answer, but I cut her off.

“Look, this isn’t a good time. For . . . whatever.” I gesture vaguely at them with my frustration phone-fist. I don’t even remember when or where I set down the shears, but I don’t have them anymore.

The giant’s brow-furrow gets deeper, but the woman is undeterred.

“Well, we have an appointment.”

“Not with me, you don’t.”

“Right. We have an appointment with Jess Greene.”

That steam in my head—it’s spread everywhere now, and I look down, trying desperately to ground myself. The woman’s still talking, but I can’t hear her. If I could only calm down enough to think straight, or if Tegan would just reply. If there was some sort of explanation for some appointment I don’t remember making, if—

“. . . Broadside Media, and we’ve been working with—”

“Wait,” I say, something about what the woman has said finally getting through this haze of confusion and fear.

It’s something familiar.

Not just what she’s said, but how she’s said it. Her voice.

I know that voice. Don’t I?

Forget the stew, the steam. I am chilled straight through, remembering a time when I heard that voice—through my headphones, or through the speakers in my old Honda—week after week, on the wildly successful, wildly popular podcast everyone I knew seemed to be listening to.

Eventually—as everything in my life, in my sister’s life, was falling apart—I’d thought that voice was somehow speaking directly to me. Pressing closer and closer to those fallen-apart pieces.

I’d never wanted to hear it again.

I look up, and the giant’s watching me close. The woman with the familiar voice is waiting, just like I asked her to. In the space between them, behind them, I catch a movement on the driveway, a flash of white fabric, a familiar shock of red hair. Freshly trimmed.

It’s my sister, carrying a plastic bag from the pharmacy around the corner, walking toward us quickly, her face flushed.

Panicked.

“Jess,” Tegan says, and the giant and the woman both turn to face her.

“Jess!” the woman echoes, friendly recognition in her tone.

But then her brow furrows, too, and she looks between us.

“I’m Jess,” I say to her, at the same time Tegan says, “This is my sister.”

The giant and the woman share a brief, concerned look. But she recovers quickly. She volleys her gaze between me and Tegan again and says, “Interesting,” and my God, it is her. I’d recognize the way she said that word anywhere.

She used to say it at least once an episode.

Salem Durant. The woman whose hugely popular podcast series ended up being about something way too close for comfort.

Something way too close to home.

I’ve been working all these years to keep it far, far away. Especially from Tegan.

My sister and I speak over each other again. Me with a sharp, desperate, “There’s obviously been a mistake,” and her with a determined, unapologetic, “I can explain.”

Salem Durant smiles again. A cat that got the cream. A story that just became twice as interesting.

She says, “I’ve come to talk to you about your mother.”

It’s a shame I haven’t learned to trust my instincts.

Because I had a feeling something was off.

Since last night, for sure, when we got off the plane here and I got recognized for the first time. It wasn’t necessarily unusual given my past, but still felt like a bad omen for this particular trip, when I’m working so hard to put some distance between then and now.

Since six days ago, when Salem announced these travel plans in the first place, a light in her eyes I’d heard about from others, but hadn’t once seen in all the months I’d been working with her, had appeared.

Since two months ago, when I first read a short email sent to the Broadside Media pitch account, promising new information on a story that was almost ten years old.

A story I knew Salem had never forgotten.

I had a feeling—even as I forwarded that email along—that there was something strange about it.

But instincts, I’d told myself, were not for thirty-three-year-old recent grads from J-School. They were for people further along in this career than me, for journalists who’ve been around on the actual job and who’ve seen more than I have. Instincts without experience, one of my professors once said to me, were a liability.

Salem has always been known for her good instincts.

Except on this story, I guess, which is why it’s a shame I still don’t trust mine.

Too late now.

There’s a heavy silence between the four of us. The redhead who’s just come up the driveway—the young woman Salem and I have known as Jess Greene for the last two months—is swallowing heavily as she stares at the woman who opened the door. Her sister, apparently, and also, apparently, the real Jess Greene.

Salem still has that light in her eyes, and for a second I wonder if she had an instinct something was off, too. If in fact we’re here because of that instinct.

She speaks first, calm and unbothered. “May we come in?”

“No,” says Jess, her voice sharp, impatient, and I can’t help but look at her again. When she first opened the door, I’d had an instinct, all right, but it wasn’t a professional one. I’d felt a strange thunk in my chest at the sight of her: big, blue eyes and the thickest blond hair I’ve ever seen, wavy and reaching well past her shoulders. Against her clothes—a loose black T-shirt, slim black jeans, black sneakers—everything light about her had been a curious sort of shock.

“Jess,” says the other woman, the redhead, the person whose name we don’t even know, and it at least pulls me back into the moment. A source who’s deceived us, who’s given us information that’s probably useless to us now. This might be Salem’s story, but I’m not trying to be involved in things she considers a failure.

I’m trying to impress her.

“Let them in,” the redhead says. “I’ll exp—”

Jess cuts her off. “Explain why you have a bag packed?”

The redhead flushes. I saw her a couple of times when I was sitting in while Salem did video calls with her. She looked older on the screen, and I wonder if she somehow altered her appearance for those calls. Worn makeup or clothes that’d make her seem more grown-up. Standing here, I wouldn’t guess she is any older than twenty.

This is a disaster.

“Yes,” she says, and I transfer my gaze to Jess, which is a mistake, because for a split second, a second that might be imperceptible to everyone on this front stoop but me—she looks as if she might cry. My chest aches. The wrong instinct. I’m supposed to be curious, determined.

I’m supposed to want to figure this out.

“You can explain that without them coming in,” she finally says, no trace of tears in her voice.

“I don’t think she can,” Salem says, and then she turns her eyes on the redhead. Our source. “I think you probably have an explanation to make to me, too.”

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Jess snaps.

Salem raises her hands in surrender. I cross my arms and look down at my boots. Maybe we ought to give these women some time alone.

The redhead clears her throat.

“Ms. Durant,” she says, even though she’s been calling her Salem for the last two months. “My name is Tegan Caulfield. I know I told you something different. I—”

“Are you recording this?” Jess says.

“No,” I say, and Salem cuts me a look. I don’t know why I answered. My job here isn’t really to talk, at least not yet.

“We are not,” Salem says pointedly, and I’m pretty sure some of the tone there is directed at me. She looks at Tegan. “Go on.”

I expect Jess to intervene again, but whether it’s shock or curiosity or some combination of the two, she doesn’t, not yet.

“Jess is my sister. My half sister. I contacted you using her name because two months ago, I was still seventeen years old.”

Oh, Christ. My fingers dig into my biceps. Salem betrays nothing. In my periphery, I think I can see Jess’s chest rising and falling with quick breaths.

“But I’m eighteen now. And the information I’ve given you is good. It’s—”

“Absolutely not,” Jess says, finally speaking again. When I look at her, I can tell she’s straightened her posture. She’s lifted her chin, too. But her cheeks are flushed, same as her sister’s. “Whatever this is, we’re not doing it. You two need to go. Tegan, you need to come inside.”

It’s a knee-jerk, desperate response; I can tell. She feels powerless, confused, caught off guard. We may not have come for her, but whether she knows it or not, Salem’s already thinking of her as a source, too. And Salem is good at cultivating sources. She’s good at calmly sharing what she already knows; she’s good at making every bit of the story she’s working on seem like it’s in the public interest.

People say you can’t stonewall Salem Durant.

But I have a feeling Jess Greene might be an exception.

“I’m happy to share with you—” Salem begins, but Jess shakes her head.

“I don’t know what my sister has told you. But whatever it is, it’s a mistake. She doesn’t know—”

“Jess,” Tegan says, and if there were traces of regret or apology in her voice, she’s stripped them out now. She sounds as harsh and as hard as her sister did only a second ago. She sounds angry.

For an uncomfortable stretch, the two stare at each other. This strange arrangement—the four of us standing here—we’re a broken compass. Tegan and Jess at two poles, north and south. Salem and I, east and west. The needle spins frantically around, disoriented by all this tension.

Then Tegan speaks. “I found Mom’s postcards.”

I watch Jess turn white.

“And I know you know where she is.”

Jess swallows. She tightens her fingers around her phone.

And then she says, “You’d better come in.”

MY guess is, these two don’t often have company.

The house is small, tidy, and spare. The round table in the eat-in kitchen where we stand has four chairs, but it probably only sits two comfortably. In the next room, there’s a couch, but it’s the kind an ex-girlfriend of mine used to have in her studio apartment, the kind where I alone would take over half the thing even if I stayed fully upright. Outside, through the sliding glass door off the living room, there’s a small deck: two chairs, a tiny table in between.

I’m used to feeling huge in a space, but this is next level. Salem and I don’t just seem like we’ve made it crowded; we seem like we’ve made it somehow unsafe. I shove my hands in my pockets, sweat blooming on my lower back.

I look over to where Jess stands by the counter, her arms crossed. Peeking out from beneath the sleeve of her T-shirt, I can see a network of thin, black lines—tattoos I’m too curious about. I caught myself, when she stepped back from the front door and I gestured for Salem and Tegan to go in before me, trying to make eye contact with her. Like I could somehow apologize for how upset she looked.

There’s no reason for me to be noticing her tattoos, no reason to be apologizing.

I shift my gaze toward Salem.

“Shall we sit?” my boss says confidently, gesturing toward the table.

Tegan moves quickly toward it, pulling out a chair. “Oh, yeah—sorry! We should definitely sit.”

I realize Tegan doesn’t just look younger than she did on those video calls. She sounds younger, too. Like she’d really become someone else during them. I’m sure Salem’s already clocked the irony, given the story we’ve come to track down.

Salem and Tegan settle at the table, and at first, Jess stays put, her expression mulish. When her sister and my boss both lift their hands and clasp them atop the table’s surface, though, looking as if they’re settling in for a negotiation, Jess seems to break, resigned. She drops her arms and joins them.

Salem looks over at me meaningfully. She has to be kidding. There’s no way I’ll fit at that table. My knees will probably jam into all three of them.

“I’ll stand,” I say, and take up the spot by the counter Jess vacated.

“Why don’t we start with introductions?” Salem says. “I’m—”

“I know who you are,” Jess says. “Obviously Tegan knows, too. Let’s skip that.”

Salem glides right over this, gesturing to me. “This is my colleague, Adam Hawkins. Everyone calls him Hawk.”

I try not to wince. She’s not wrong, but I’ve never much liked the nickname. I used to try to correct people about it, but other than my family, only Cope ever listened.

But now’s not really the time to think about that. Not until we get through this story.

So I nod in acknowledgment of the introduction, grateful that neither of them seem to recognize my name, and refocus.

I know what happens next matters: I know I’m about to see a side of Salem I haven’t had a chance to yet, and I know it’s an opportunity to learn. On her initial calls and video chats with Jess—no wait, Tegan—things were different. Sure, she wanted the information, but it was Tegan coming to her, not the other way around. Salem was friendly but cautious. In control. The addition of Jess—the real Jess—means she needs to change tactics if she wants to keep that control.

She looks directly at Jess. “Your sister has shared with me information about five postcards your mother sent to you in the months after she disappeared.” She pauses briefly, then adds, “We believe with a man named Lynton Baltimore.”

Jess’s hands aren’t clasped on the table; they’re hidden in her lap. But I get the sense she’s clutching them together all the same.

“I don’t know where she is,” Jess says, more to her sister than to Salem. “I don’t.”

“But you did, once. And you never told me,” Tegan says. “Five different times you knew.”

Salem watches them carefully, and it’s strange, the pang of judgment I feel. I’m watching carefully, too, after all. I’m her shadow; I’m supposed to be learning this, and it’s a privilege to be learning it from Salem Durant. Being a journalist as skilled as she is—this is what I’ve set out to do.

This is what I need to do.

“I won’t talk about that now. Not in front of them,” Jess says to her sister, before looking back at Salem. “We don’t want to talk to the media.”

“I want to talk to them,” Tegan says, angry again. “I’ve been talking to them. I told them about Mom, and about Miles Daniels. Or Lynton Baltimore, I guess, whatever. I already told them.”

Jess’s eyes close briefly, and my chest aches again, so much that I have to look away. But Salem catches my eye, and man—those instincts. If they took a hiatus during her time talking to Tegan Caulfield, they’re fully checked back in now, because I can tell she’s seen me watching Jess. I can tell she somehow knows about that aching.

This job is about the truth, Hawk, she said to me a few months ago, when I’d first told her about my idea, the one that got me pursuing this career in the first place. I’m not saying it’s not about other things, too. But the truth has to be first, even when it’s about your best friend. You need to figure out if you’ll be able to tell it.

I straighten, the memory of those words a talisman, a discipline. I cross to the table, pull out the last chair. I move it far away from the table, sparing everyone my knees. It creaks when I sit, but I don’t cringe.

I’ll be able to tell it.

This Lynton Baltimore story is just practice. A test.

Salem sits back in her chair, as though she’s welcoming me into the fold.

“We don’t want to intrude on a private family discussion,” she says gently, and I know that’s a tactic, too. She’s not going to let Jess Greene stonewall her, not today, because she’s not going to ask anything of her.

Not yet.

“It’s clear that this is a shock, so let me sum up. Then Hawk and I will leave you to your discussion.”

“But—” Tegan protests, a note of fear in her voice, because she can’t tell this is a strategy. She’s worried Salem’s giving up on her.

“About ten years ago,” Salem says, as though Tegan hasn’t spoken. Right now, she’s only talking to Jess. “I released a serialized podcast about a confidence man named Lynton Baltimore. You’re aware of it?”

Jess swallows. A single, nearly imperceptible nod. I ignore the ache.

“So, you know that the final episode of the show was meant to be an in-person interview between me and this man, following his release from prison.”

Jess doesn’t bother nodding this time.

“And you’re also aware that he never showed up for this interview.”

“Because he came here,” Tegan says, and I watch Jess’s throat bob again. “He came here and met Mom.”

“And then, sometime after that,” Salem adds, keeping her attention fully on Jess, “He seems to have simply disappeared.”

“With Mom,” Tegan says, obviously bruised about not having Salem’s full attention.

“We don’t know that,” says Jess.

“The postcards your sister found suggest—” Salem says.

“They don’t. They don’t say anything about Lynton Baltimore.”

“Well,” Salem says. “They wouldn’t, would they?”

It’s the first time Salem’s cool politeness has slipped. Probably Jess and Tegan don’t hear it, the edge of frustration in her voice, but I do. I know from these last couple of months that this is one of those other things for Salem, something beyond just truth-seeking for her story. She’s never really forgotten it, that she’s the namesake of her famous podcast.

As far as the world knows, Salem Durant—prepped and waiting for an interview with a man who never showed—is the last con of Lynton Baltimore.

She clears her throat.

“We want to find out the truth about him,” she says, gentling her voice again. “About where he’s been for all these years. We think your mother might be the key to that.”

“Well, it’s like I said,” Jess says, new determination in her voice. She wants us out. “I don’t know where she is. So we can’t help you.”

“We’re going to find her,” Tegan blurts, hasty and overloud, and Salem purses her lips. I can tell she was hoping to make a graceful exit before this part came up. “We’ve planned it all out.”

“We’re still working out the details,” Salem clarifies, but that’s a stretch. Out in the rental car, there’s a binder of details that I put together. Maps, itineraries, contact information for a few leads. There’s also the detail that Salem and I are scheduled to be out of the office for the next month, working on this story.

Jess ignores Salem and stares at her sister. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a face like hers—it’s like looking through a window at a storm. There’s rain, lightning, wind; there’re trees bending and shaking with the force of it. Part of you is glad to be separate from it.

But part of you wants to press against the glass and get as close as you can.

“That’s why you have a bag packed?” she says.

Tegan nods, but doesn’t meet her sister’s eyes.

“Were you going to tell me?”

There’s a long, laden pause.

“I was going to leave a note.”

That storm I’m watching on Jess Greene’s face—it’s a gale force in her eyes. I wonder if Salem is bending under its strength, too.

I brace myself, because what follows th. . .