“I’m sorry, Maddie,” Hailey said, sliding off her stool to join them. “I was being sneaky. Sunny was in the bathroom, and her bag was on the floor. I tucked Betty Bear way down at the bottom so she’d find her later and not be lonely.”
Something prickled at the back of Liam’s mind — a half-formed thought, a ghost of possibility.
“Maddie,” Liam said, turning to his older daughter. “Betty Bear — isn’t she the one we kept losing? At the park, and then at the restaurant?”
Maddie nodded, confusion replacing her sadness. “Yeah. You said she was a bear magnet for trouble.”
Liam’s heart began to race. “And what did I do after we left her at the restaurant that last time? To make sure we could find her if she got lost again?”
Maddie’s eyes widened as realization dawned. " You put the special beepy thing in her tummy.”
“The air tag,” Liam confirmed, already fumbling for his phone, fingers tremblingslightly as he navigated to the tracking app he’d downloaded months ago and nearly forgotten.
Hailey looked between them, bewildered by this sudden shift. “What’s happening?”
“If Betty Bear is with Sunny,” Liam explained, his eyes fixed on the loading screen, “then the tracker inside Betty Bear might tell us where Sunny is.”
Beth moved closer, hope flickering across her usually composed features. “Can it really work? After all this time?”
“The battery lasts for months,” Liam said, willing the app to load faster. The small spinning wheel seemed to mock him, each rotation stretching into eternity.
“Come on,” he muttered, staring at the screen. “Come on.”
The girls crowded against him, their bodies tense with anticipation. An error message flashed across the screen: “Unable to connect. Check network connection.”
“No, no, no,” Liam hissed, his hand gripping the phone so tightly his knuckles whitened. He tapped the retry button, his heart pounding in his ears. The spinning wheel returned, taunting him with each slow rotation.
“Is it broken?” Hailey asked, her small voice quavering.
“Just needs a minute,” Liam reassured her, though uncertainty gnawed at him. What if the battery had died? What if the signal was too weak? What if this last, fragile thread of hope was about to snap?
The app finally loaded, but displayed only a gray map with no signal. “Searching for device…” flashed at the bottom of the screen.
“Maybe it’s too far away,” Maddie whispered, disappointment already creeping into her voice.
Beth placed a steadying hand on Liam’s shoulder. “Give it time.”
Seconds ticked by like hours. The search radius on the map expanded once, twice, three times. And then — a faint blue dot appeared, blinkingweakly at the edge of the screen. It disappeared, then reappeared, as if struggling to maintain connection.
“There!” Maddie gasped.
“Wait,” Liam cautioned, hardly daring to breathe. The signal flickered again, vanished for three agonizing seconds, then suddenly solidified — a strong, steady blue dot approximately 120 kilometers from their current location.
Active. The tracker was fully active. Betty Bear was out there, somewhere near Lake Willow, according to the map.
And if Betty Bear was there…
“Is that where Sunny is?” Maddie asked.
Liam stared at the pulsing blue light on his screen, a lighthouse beacon guiding him through the fog of loss and regret.
“I think so,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.
He looked at Hailey, awe replacing his earlier concern. “Hailey, you wonderful, brilliant girl. You might have just saved us all.”
“I did?” Hailey straightened, confusion giving way to tentative pride.
“You did.” Liam wrapped an arm around each of his daughters, drawing them close. “You were trying to be kind — wanting to comfort Sunny when she was sad. And now that kindness might be the thing that brings her home to us.”
