For a full year after Maya disappeared from summer camp, our house felt like it was holding its breath. I kept looking for answers in phone calls, old timelines, and memories of the lake, never realizing that the clearest sign of what was broken was living in the room down the hall.
Maya and Sophie were twins. Before that summer, they were rarely apart. After Maya vanished, Sophie came home without her sister, and I convinced myself that her quietness was simply what grief looked like in a twelve-year-old.
I was wrong.
I found the shoebox while looking for Sophie’s missing math workbook. It was pushed far beneath her bed, wrapped tightly in duct tape, as if it held something too dangerous to touch. My first thought was Maya. My second was the police.