I kept looking at the photograph.
The woman beside me was saying something, but her voice seemed to come from a long way off.
Three weeks earlier.
My daughter had been alive three weeks earlier.
I touched the edge of the phone with one finger.
“Can I see it again?”
The woman nodded and held the screen closer.
I studied the face.
The hair was longer than I remembered it being when my daughter left. There were lines around her eyes that hadn't been there at seventeen.
But I knew her.
I had imagined this moment so many times that I was almost afraid to believe it was happening.
In some of those imagined reunions, she was still a teenager.
In others, she was grown, standing in front of me with an explanation ready.
I had pictured her angry.
I had pictured her crying.
I had even pictured her looking at me without recognizing me.
I had never pictured finding her through a photograph on a stranger's phone.
“Where was this taken?”
The woman lowered the phone slightly.
“I took it recently.”
“Where?”
She hesitated.
I gripped the strap of my purse to keep my hands from trembling.
“Please. I have been looking for her for sixteen years.”
“I know.”
She said it so quietly that I almost missed it.
I looked at her.
“How do you know?”
She glanced at the bag between us.
Then she looked toward the crowd again.
“I think we need to sit down.”
I didn't want to sit down.
I wanted an address.
I wanted a name.
I wanted to know whether my daughter was somewhere nearby, whether she had been living in another town, whether she knew I was still searching.
But the woman's face had become so pale that I worried she might faint.
I followed her to a quieter spot near the edge of the boardwalk.
We sat on a bench.
The wood was warm from the sun.
People continued passing in front of us, carrying beach towels and paper cups, unaware that my entire life had just shifted.
The woman placed her phone on her knee.
She kept one hand over it.
I looked at the bag.
“Did you buy it from my daughter?”
She swallowed.
“I bought it from someone who had it.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
“I know.”
Her eyes filled again.
I could feel my temper rising, but I forced myself to breathe.
I had spent years regretting the things I said when I was angry.
I wasn't going to let another conversation become something I could never repair.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm frightened. I don't know what to think.”
She nodded.
“I understand.”
I wasn't sure she did.
Nobody who hadn't searched for a missing child could understand what those sixteen years had done to me.
Every possible answer had become something I feared.
If my daughter was dead, I wanted to know.
If she was alive and had chosen never to contact me, I wanted to know that too.
Not knowing had been its own kind of punishment.
The woman picked up her phone again.
She looked at the photograph for a moment before turning it toward me.
“That's the person I saw.”
I nodded.
“It's my daughter.”
I said it more firmly this time.
The words felt different when I spoke them aloud.
Not a hope.
Not a question.
My daughter.
I leaned closer to the screen.
“Was she alone?”
The woman took a breath.
“I can't answer everything right now.”
I looked at her sharply.
“Why not?”
“Because I don't know how much I should tell you without explaining how I came to have the bag.”
“Then explain.”
She looked down at her hands.
For the first time, I noticed how tightly she was holding the strap.
Her knuckles had gone pale.
“I didn't know who you were when you stopped me.”
“I know that.”
“I thought the bag was just something I'd bought.”
“But you recognized her name.”
She closed her eyes briefly.
“Yes.”
My stomach tightened.
“From where?”
She didn't answer immediately.
I heard someone nearby ask for directions.
A child ran past us, dragging a towel along the boards.
The ordinary sounds seemed cruel in their normality.
My daughter's face was on a phone in my hands, and I was still asking questions like a stranger trying to solve a puzzle.
I wanted to reach through the photograph and pull her back into my life.
Instead, I waited.
The woman finally looked at me.
“When you said the date, I realized this might be the same person.”
“The same person as who?”
She rubbed her thumb over the edge of the phone.
“I need to tell you what I know.”
“Please do.”
She drew in a slow breath.
Then she began explaining how the bag had come into her possession.
I listened without interrupting.
At first, I concentrated on the practical details.
When she had acquired it.
What she had been told.
Why she had kept it.
But every few sentences, my mind returned to the photograph.
Three weeks earlier.
My daughter had been alive three weeks earlier.
The woman was careful with her words.
She didn't pretend to know everything.
She didn't make promises.
She told me only what she could account for herself.
That caution should have comforted me.
Instead, it made me want to shake the rest of the story out of her.
I had waited sixteen years.
I wanted the truth in a single breath.
When she finished explaining what she could, she looked at me with an expression I recognized.
It was the face people made when they had something difficult to say but were afraid of causing more pain.
I had seen it on the detectives who came to the house.
I had seen it on friends who no longer knew what to ask.
I hated that expression.
“What else?” I asked.
She looked at the bag.
“I don't want to tell you something I can't prove.”
I nodded, though the answer frustrated me.
I had spent years living with claims that could not be proved.
A man from Nevada had tried to sell me a blurry photograph.
Other people had offered stories without anything solid behind them.
I wasn't going to pay for another promise.
But this woman had something none of them had possessed.
The bag.
The keychain.
A recent photograph of my daughter.
I could touch the knitted yarn.
I could hear the metal charm tapping softly against the strap.
I could see my daughter's face.
Those things were real.
For the first time in sixteen years, my search had brought me to a person who might know something more than I did.
I took a slow breath.
“Can you help me find her?”
The woman looked at me for a long time.
Then she nodded.
“I can tell you what I know.”
It wasn't everything I wanted.
It was more than I had possessed that morning.
I held on to that.
Click here to continue reading: PART 6: I Had Spent Years Preparing for Bad News, but Nothing Had Prepared Me for the Possibility That My Daughter Might Have Stayed Away
The Last Thing I Said to My Seventeen-Year-Old Daughter Was Something I Would Spend the Rest of My Life Wishing I Could Take Back
Part 5 of 12
