For ten years, Nora carried a name she never earned. In our town, people looked at her as if she had done something unforgivable, as if a frightened child could somehow explain the night my daughter Emily disappeared in the rain.
I was judged too. People said I was foolish for bringing Nora into my home after Emily vanished. They said grief had made me blind. But I knew one thing they refused to see: Emily had loved Nora like a sister, and I could not abandon another child just because the town needed someone to blame.
Then, on another rain-soaked night, Nora came through my front door shaking. She was older now, but in that moment she looked like the terrified girl who had returned without Emily all those years before.
She called me Dad, then said the sentence that made the whole room feel smaller: she had tried to tell the truth about who took Emily.