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what? She wasn’t. She was taken from us. And she was with you this morning, I’m pretty sure of it.” I paused. “Please. I’m begging you. We’ve been looking for her for years. And we came here from Minnesota. We need to find her. Where is she?”
    She pulled a phone from her pocket, punched a number and held it to her ear.
    “Morgan?” I asked again. “Where is she?”
    She held up a finger.
    I waited.
    “Shit,” she muttered under her breath. She didn’t apologize this time.
    “What?” I asked.
    “She’s at the airport,” Morgan said.

NINE
     
     
    “She called me three days ago,” Morgan said. “Asked if I could meet her and loan her some money.”
    We were inside Morgan’s house. She’d continued to try and call Elizabeth, but even I knew it was useless. Bryce had said she'd turned off her phone. My gut was churning more than it ever had. I couldn’t rationalize how we could be so close, yet so far away. It wasn’t fair.
    “I moved here two years ago,” Morgan said, shedding the vest and kicking off her shoes, still clutching her phone. “We went to the same school in Minnesota. We were best friends. But my dad got some stupid job here and we had to move.”
    She moved out of the entryway toward the kitchen.
    “We talk every week,” she continued. “We’re still best friends. Or just like best friends. Or whatever. We text. We email. Facebook. But we talk every Sunday night on the phone for sure. Two years, we haven’t missed a Sunday night.”
    I nodded.
    “So it was weird to see her number pop up on a non-Sunday,” Morgan said. “Like, I knew something was wrong. I just knew. And she told me how she found a paper or something that said she was adopted.”
    “How was she?” Lauren asked. “I mean, how did she feel about that?”
    “She was confused,” Morgan said, setting the phone down on a massive stone island in the middle of the kitchen. “And hurt. And pissed. I tried to talk her down, get her to chill, but she was beyond pissed. She felt like her whole life was a lie.”
    “Had she ever said anything before about being adopted?” I asked.
    Morgan shook her head, the braid swinging back and forth. “Nope. But she always was kinda weird about when she was a kid.”
    “What do you mean?” I wanted to sit down and pore over every detail she could give me. It was irrational and there wasn’t time for that but it didn’t keep me from wanting it.
    Morgan glanced at her phone, frowned. “Like, she couldn’t remember a lot. And she didn’t tell people that because she couldn’t figure out why.”
    Lauren and I exchanged glances. I’d often daydreamed that Elizabeth was alive and I’d wondered what she’d remember. If she would remember being taken. Or Coronado. Or us. Lauren had always maintained that if she was alive and the abduction wasn’t violent, she probably had blocked out a lot of the details. She’d done hours of reading and research in the days and weeks following her disappearance, digging into the psychology of kidnapped children. Many missing kids blocked out the traumatic details of suddenly losing one life and being thrust into another. They would accept a fictional history rather than deal with the reality of having been ripped from loved ones.
    “Why did she come here?” I asked. “To Denver. I mean, if she wasn’t planning on staying?”
    Morgan raised her eyebrows at me like the answer was simple. “Because of me.”
    “You.”
    “She knew she could trust me,” she said. “She knew I’d help her.”
    I leaned against the breakfast bar. “What did she need?”
    “Money,” she said. “A new phone. A ride away from her dork of a boyfriend.”
    I felt a little pang of sympathy for Bryce, the slighted boyfriend, but quickly put it aside. “And you took her to the airport?”
    She glanced down at her phone again. “Yeah. But she won’t answer.”
    “The new phone?” I asked. “The one you gave her?”
    She nodded.
    “Why the