That was all I.S. could say.
Detective Pruitt called regularly until he retired.
There were sightings.
Rumors.
Scams.
Once, a man in Nevada emailed me a photograph of a young woman standing beside a motel pool.
You couldn’t see her face.
He said it was Gia.
He demanded four hundred dollars for more photographs and her location.
For about thirty terrible seconds, I considered paying.
Then I called police.
It led nowhere.
Most tips did.
Someone swore Gia was working in Tennessee.
Another person claimed she had joined a religious group in Arizona.
Every possibility brought her back for a moment.
Every dead end took her away again.
By the fifth year, people stopped saying Gia’s name around me.
I refused to stop.
When someone asked whether I had children, I said yes.
When I talked about the past, I said her name.
Gia.
I would not let my daughter become a silence everyone politely avoided.
Sixteen years passed like that.
Then, last July, I found myself walking the boardwalk in Ocean City.
It was hot and crowded.
Children carried melting ice cream.
Music poured from an arcade.
The air smelled of fried food, sunscreen, and salt.
I had bought a bottle of water and was walking nowhere in particular when I saw a woman coming toward me.
She had a knitted cream-colored bag over her shoulder.
I stopped so suddenly that the man behind me bumped into me.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
I barely heard him.
My eyes were fixed on the bottom of the bag.
On one crooked row of stitches.
I knew that mistake.
I had cried over that stupid mistake in my kitchen years earlier because Gia wanted the bag finished before the weekend.
Then the woman shifted the strap.
A brass keychain swung against her hip.
The world tilted.
I started after her.
Every instinct screamed at me to run.
Another part of me was terrified of catching up and discovering I was wrong.
The woman looked about forty.
