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offended by his characterization of me as “emotional,” yet I’m proving his point even as I speak. Our marriage has become a bramble bush. It’s so easy to get nicked.
    Paul finally enters the room and sits beside me on the window seat. He wants me to look at him, and I would, but I’m crying again, and embarrassed about it. Emotional. Of course I’m emotional. My daughter’s out there all alone. Or not alone, which might be worse.
    “Why aren’t you emotional?” I ask.
    “Inside, I’m a wreck. I thought she’d be home by now.”
    “Would it kill you to show the wreckage every once in a while?”
    He smiles, his eyes sad. “I don’t know. Maybe it would.” Then his gaze follows mine, across the field. Is he picturing Marley, too? “We can’t both go to San Francisco. One of us needs to be here in case Marley shows back up.”
    He’s right. The thought of Marley taking the bus somewhere and then all the way back only to find the house empty . . . It could make her feel unloved and abandoned. Maybe she’d go away all over again. We’d never even know she’d been here.
    “I listened to your voice mail,” he says. His eyes are tender in his tired face. “The one you left for Marley before you realized her phone was still here.”
    “No, I knew her phone was here. I just couldn’t stop myself from talking.”
    Another smile. “We’ll find her, Rach. Or she’ll come back on her own. It’ll be okay.”
    “When she comes home, what do we do? Do we punish her? Put her back in therapy?”
    “We hug her for a long time, and then we ground her until college.”
    In the end, Paul follows his plan and I stay behind. I call Trish at exactly nine A.M . She answers the phone groggily. She must not turn it off even to go to sleep. Neither did Marley.
    “Mrs. Willits,” she says. I envision her stretching awake: long black hair and long limbs. Marley’s pretty, in my estimation, but even I have to admit that Trish is striking. She’s not waiting to grow into her looks like Marley is. She’s arrived. “Have you heard anything from Marley?”
    “I was hoping you had.”
    “No. But I’ll definitely call you if I do.” I sense evasion in her tone.
    “Trish, I need you to do me a favor. I need you to imagine that you’re a mother. And that means that there’s this person who you love more than anything. There’s this person that you’d die for.” Crap. I’m going to cry again. “And she’s taken off. She bought a bus ticket somewhere, and you don’t know where. But you know that bad things can happen to a fourteen-year-old, alone.” I pause. “Do you know what I’m saying?”
    “You’re worried about Marley.”
    All those AP classes are really paying off. “Yes, I’m worried. Because she’s not safe out there. You’re not helping her if you lie to me. You’re not protecting her.”
    “I’m not lying.” She sounds piqued rather than empathetic. My little exercise backfired.
    “But is there more to the story? Is there something you haven’t told me?”
    “It’s just”—she hesitated—“Marley isn’t going to call me.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I told her not to call me anymore. Didn’t she tell you? It was, like, months ago.”
    After the sleepover. “No, she didn’t tell me.”
    “We weren’t texting that much after she moved anyway. Then she came down here and she—well, I’m just going to tell you. Maybe it’ll help or something. She went out for a while and she came back shitfaced. Like, really drunk. And I was mad, because if my parents caught her, they’d think I was drinking, too. Besides, she was too drunk for us to really even hang out.”
    “Where was she?” Whoever she was with then, she could be with them right now.
    “I don’t know. I was so mad, I didn’t even want to talk to her.”
    “Do you think she was with a boyfriend?”
    “Marley’s never had a boyfriend.” She sounds certain and smug.
    I lean my forehead against the window glass.