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manipulate to make it happen, and I needed for her to be fine, so I never excavated.
    Well, I’m excavating now. But I’m terrified it’s too late.
    The fact that all her “devices,” as Officer Strickland calls them, have been cleared out means the police are definitively treating this as a runaway case. I got a sense of what that meant when I asked Officer Strickland if the police department will be getting Marley’s passwords to the various sites and monitoring all her communications for clues as to where she went. He was noncommittal bordering on dismissive. It’s obvious that very few of the police’s “limited resources” will go toward finding Marley. He suggested we review our phone bills to see if there are any numbers we don’t recognize. We already did, I reminded him. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Every text has been deleted, and Verizon doesn’t keep copies.
    What if I had scrolled through her texts a week ago? A month ago? Maybe she’d be down the hall, asleep, instead of . . . I don’t want to finish that sentence, don’t want to articulate the possibilities.
    By now, I’ve basically accepted that Marley ran away. But what no one seems to fully grasp is how dangerous it is for a young girl onthe run, especially one whose life has never required survival skills. Even though she left on her own, if she stays gone, that might not be her choice. It might be out of her control.
    Even her father refuses to see it. Paul is downstairs in his office, on his own computer. If we follow protocol, he believes, she’ll be home safe and sound within the week. Fifty percent of runaways are, he repeats. Tomorrow, we’ll pay a professional to search Marley’s devices, see if we can recover what she wanted to stay hidden.
    I, of all people, should have sensed something. I know firsthand that you can look one way and feel something else entirely. That you can do things no one would suspect of you, all while going about your ordinary business. You never miss a day of work (or school, in Marley’s case). You never arouse suspicion. Because mostly, people pay attention to the wrong things. All the clues you drop, intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or subconsciously—they go unnoticed. You escape detection. Then one day, you simply escape.
    I click on a picture of Marley with her friends Sasha and Trish, out by Trish’s pool. Sasha’s laughing, with one of her curls boinging into her mouth, and Trish is looking sun-kissed and glamorous, camera-ready as always. They’re flanking Marley, who appears to be squinting into the sun; blown up, her smile seems forced. Her arms are tight across her stomach, hiding it maybe, but the effect is that as her friends hug her, she’s hugging only herself. Alone in a crowd, is that the expression? I think of her last post (“Tell me you’re with me so far”), met with silence.
    The picture is from three months ago, the last time Marley stayed at Trish’s house. Paul and I dropped her off and then spent the weekend at a bed-and-breakfast in San Francisco. The room was all in white, everything eco-friendly, luminescent bath gels smelling of lemongrass, a giant soaking tub, and rose petals across the ivory bedspread that actually looked a bit lurid, like the scene of a crime. We had sex because it had been a long time and because we were supposed to. At least, that was my motivation. “You were so quiet,” Paulsaid afterward, and he’d tried so hard, with all of it, that I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hadn’t come. I hadn’t felt much of anything. When we picked Marley up at Trish’s house, she was in no mood to talk either. Paul tried to fill the void for the first half hour of the drive and then gave up.
    Why didn’t I ask Marley what happened that weekend? I mean, I did, in the laziest way, just a quick “How was it?” when she first got in the car. But I didn’t follow up later that Sunday night, or the next day. I never questioned