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In the back of the cab, I cry.
Sienna has been taken from me. The only thing in the world that matters is gone.
The police arrive at the school before I do. As the cab pulls in, I find two police cruisers in the circle drive of the parking lot. Students walk past, heading out for an open period, noticing the cars. I pay the cab driver, throwing too much money at him, and then run out of the car and past the students, tugging in vain on the main door handles, but they’re locked. I have to wait to be buzzed into the building, stating my name and reason for being here before the secretary will let me in.
I find the police officers standing in the main office, surrounded by the school principal, the assistant principals and the secretary, everyone looking grim. “Mrs. Long?” one of the officers asks as I enter, and I say yes, not bothering to correct him.
“Someone has my daughter,” I cry out.
“She’s on her way,” he says.
My head snaps. “What?” I gasp.
“Your daughter is on her way.”
I don’t have time to ask questions, to process it. Because from around the corner, I see her. Sienna. Her backpack is on. There are books in her arms. She is physically intact. There are no cuts, no bruises, no gag. Her face is neutral, placid, fine. Confused.
I leave the office, running gracelessly to her, my arms outstretched like the wings of a plane.
“Mom?” she asks, coming to a dead stop just short of me. She looks at me before letting her eyes to go the police, her surprise unambiguous. “What are you doing here? What are they doing here? What happened? Is everything okay?”
“You...you weren’t in class,” I sputter, taking her into my arms, holding her so I know for certain that she is real, that she’s really here, and not only a mirage.
She lets me hold her for a brief moment, and then she steps back so she can look at me. “I... I was with Mr. Garcia. I was retaking a math test. I... I have a pass,” she says, looking back and forth between the secretary, the principal, the police officers and me, brandishing it in the air for us to see.
I start to cry again.
It was all a lie.
“It’s called a virtual kidnapping,” the police officer says to me as I sit in the police station on Addison, filling out a report with Sienna by my side. “Scammers target people and prey on their worst fears, coercing them into quickly paying ransom for a loved one’s release.”
“What about the money?”
The money, he tells me, is most likely gone. It’s already been accepted and once that’s happened, it’s virtually impossible to get back. But he will look into it.
“This man called me from Sienna’s phone. I heard her voice in the background. How?”
“It wasn’t your daughter you heard. It was someone pretending to be her, or a recording even. In stressful situations like this, it’s easy to mistake the voice. As for the call coming from your daughter’s phone, it’s called spoofing or, more specifically, caller ID spoofing. The attacker uses technology called VoIP to change the caller ID to something familiar, something personal.” He waits a beat and then says, “Everything is specifically done to scare and manipulate you.”
I feel stupid, ashamed and violated. “And I fell for it,” I say, dropping my head into a hand.
The officer says, “It’s easy to do. They can be very persuasive, and the amount of time you’re given to wire the money is so short, there is no time to think it through or to investigate. It’s very intentional, but often random. The attacker might make a dozen calls like this a day in the hopes that just one person pays the ransom fee.”
“But if it’s so random, then why Sienna? And why me?”
He shrugs. “You were unlucky.”
But I’m not so sure. I have a hard time believing this could be so arbitrary, so indiscriminate. It felt much more intentional than that.
Someone wanted to hurt me.
Seventeen
Sienna and I walk down the street, drawn together by the crowds so that our arms touch. I want to wrap my arm around her, to take her by the hand like I used to when she was young and I worried that if I didn’t hold on to her, she’d get lost or drift aimlessly into the street, but I don’t think sixteen-year-old Sienna would like that very much.
We decide on something quick, a deli on Clark, so we can take our food to go and then go back home, sit on the sofa and eat. Sienna orders a panini and me the minestrone soup, and then we stand on the far end of the counter, waiting for our food to come up. I stare at Sienna while she stares at her phone as we wait, lost in TikTok, and normally I’d tell her to put it away and talk to me, but today I don’t because the latest TikTok trend has her laughing and I love to hear that: her laugh. It’s so pure. I remind myself that there are far worse things in the world than TikTok.
I breathe in, forcing myself to enjoy the quiet and the warmth of the deli, the imagined sense of safety.
