“Then go,” I snapped. “See how far you get.”
Gia stared at me.
Then she said one word.
“Fine.”
She didn’t slam the door.
That detail has haunted me almost as much as my final sentence.
If she had slammed it, maybe I could have remembered her as furious.
Instead, she simply walked away.
By sunset, I was still angry.
By midnight, I was scared.
By morning, fear had become something physical lodged inside my chest.
I called every friend I knew.
Then their parents.
I drove through neighborhoods, parking lots, side streets, anywhere a seventeen-year-old girl might go after fighting with her mother.
When the police arrived, I gave them every detail.
Seventeen years old.
Dark hair.
Green tank top.
Cream-colored knitted beach bag.
Brass keychain.
I repeated those details so many times that eventually they stopped sounding like my daughter and started sounding like a description from a poster.
For months, every ringing phone made my heart race.
For years, I studied girls in supermarkets.
A familiar laugh could make my hands shake.
Dark hair seen from behind could ruin my entire afternoon.
I kept Gia’s toothbrush in our bathroom for nine years.
Removing it felt like giving up.
Eventually, leaving it there felt absurd.
I left it anyway.
I even renewed her library card twice.
The librarian looked confused the second time.
“Is she still using it?”
“She might.”
That was all I 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.
