She picked up the photo, studying it as if she might find a detail that would confirm or deny her worst fear. The woman’s posture was relaxed, confident. Not the posture of someone who’d been abducted fifteen years ago, but of someone who belonged in that moment, in that place, with that girl.
Her stomach turned.
She’d known all along that human trafficking was a possibility. Alice had been sixteen when she disappeared—young, pretty, vulnerable. They’d come from a broken home with parents who didn’t pay enough attention, and while that never bothered Greta—she preferred dogs and the wilderness to people most days, anyway—Alice had been desperate for someone to love her. Someone to see her. Greta’s love alone had never been enough.
And that was exactly vulnerability traffickers looked for.
“What if she’s been with them this whole time?” The words came out before she could stop them, and once they were out, she couldn’t call them back. “What if she’s—” She couldn’t finish. Her throat closed around the rest of it.
“What if she became one of them?” Naomi finished for her.
Her chest caved. She couldn’t breathe, and her hand trembled so badly that she had to set the photo down. “Is that—does that happen?”
“Yes, it happens. It’s how those rings stay alive. They break them down, build them back up, make them believe they’re part of it. The victim becomes the recruiter. It’s not—” Naomi paused,choosing her words carefully. “It’s not a choice the way we think of choices. It’s survival.”
Atlas whined from under the table, nosing at her ankle. She reached down without looking and scratched behind his ear, feeling the solid warmth of him, the steady rhythm of his breathing. He pressed harder against her leg.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Naomi said.
“I’m thinking I need a drink.” She laughed, and it came out wrong—sharp and cracked, nothing like humor. “But I’m trying to cut back, so…”
“Greta.”
She looked up.
Naomi reached across the table and squeezed her hand. She was no longer the cop delivering bad news, but the best friend here to comfort. “Talk to me.”
She didn’t even know what she wanted to say. There was so much emotion bubbling inside her, and if she opened her mouth, she feared it’d all boil over.
“Greta.”
“I’ve been searching for fifteen years,” she blurted, and it struck right then her that Logan McKenna was as old as her search.
God. What different lives she and Bear had lived. When she was a sixteen-year-old with a missing twin, he’d been a married man with a baby.
She pressed her fingers into her eyes because, for some reason, that thought made them sting more than anything else.
“I know you have,” Naomi said softly. “And I know how that feels. I also know how sometimes getting answers is worse than wondering.”
Of course Naomi understood. Her cousin had gone missing the year before Alice. It was one of the things they’d bonded over.
But then Naomi got her answers, and it wasn’t the ending anyone wanted.
Greta pulled her hands from her eyes and looked at the photo again. The woman’s hand on the bench. Those nails. Alice had always loved long nails. She’d painted them herself, sitting cross-legged on their shared bedroom floor, the little bottles of polish lined up in rainbow order, humming to herself while Greta read adventure novels, pretending not to notice.
“Fifteen years of flyers and tips and dead ends and that woman at Glenhaven who wasn’t her. I’ve driven myself into debt and ruined relationships and spent every waking minute thinking about where she might be, and the whole time—” She stopped. Her voice had started to shake, and she hated that. She swallowed hard and tried again. “The whole time, she could have been right there. In Spokane. At a bus station. Luring girls the same age she was when she disappeared.”
“Maybe,” Naomi said. “But we don’t know anything for sure yet.”
“You wouldn’t have brought this to me if you weren’t sure.”
“No. I wouldn’t have.”
The kitchen clock ticked. Somewhere down the street, a car started. Atlas shifted his weight, pressing harder against her shins.
Greta picked up the photo and turned it slightly, angling it toward the light from the window, as if a different angle might reveal something the first hadn’t. It didn’t. The woman remained a silhouette, a suggestion, a ghost made of pixels and possibility.
“What’s the next step?” she asked, and her voice came out steadier than she expected.
