Nobody had known.
Not Detective Pruitt.
Not Gia’s friends.
Not me.
Suddenly, our arguments from that final summer rearranged themselves in my memory.
Her moodiness.
The oversized sweatshirt she sometimes wore despite the heat.
The way she stopped eating breakfast.
The panic whenever I mentioned doctors.
Had she been trying to tell me?
Had I been too busy arguing about clothing and curfews to notice?
Gia had left my house at seventeen carrying a beach bag and a secret she had been too frightened to share.
And sixteen years after I shouted, “Then go. See how far you get,” I learned that somewhere in the world, I might have a grandchild who had never even heard my name.
For years, I thought the hardest thing was not knowing whether Gia survived.
Now I knew she had.
At least for a while.
And somehow that made the questions bigger.
Who had been standing behind her in that photograph?
