Chapter 2

The gardener, Mr. Henderson, found her. Not her, but the beginning of the end. He was trimming the hedges along the back fence that bordered the state park, a full week after she was taken. He told the police he smelled something wrong.

"Not like a dead animal," he' d said, his weathered hands twisting the brim of his hat. "Something else. Sweet, but wrong."

He followed the scent, pushing through a section of overgrown woods just beyond our property line. That' s where the first officers arrived, their cars quiet on the gravel path.

I watched them from my bedroom window. They moved with a purpose that felt both terrifying and final. I didn' t know what they were looking for, but a cold dread settled deep in my bones. I was just a kid, but I knew this wasn' t about a missing person anymore. This was about something that couldn' t be unfixed.

My paternal grandmother, Mrs. Sterling, had arrived a few hours earlier. She' d heard the news reports and came without even calling my father. She held my hand, her grip firm and steady, while we watched the flashing blue and red lights paint streaks across the manicured lawns.

"Maybe she just got lost, Ava," my grandmother whispered, though her voice lacked conviction. "Your mother loves her long walks."

But my mother didn't take walks in that part of the woods. It was too wild, too far from the marked trails she preferred.

I thought about what my mom told me once when our old golden retriever died. She said all good things go up to the sky and become stars, so they can watch over you. I looked out the window, past the flashing lights, up at the evening sky. I tried to find a new star, one that was brighter than the others. I couldn' t see anything but the familiar constellations.

The lead detective came to the house later. He was a tall man with a tired face. He spoke to my grandmother in low tones in the living room. I sat on the top step of the stairs, hidden in the shadows, listening.

"We found a woman' s body, ma' am," the detective said. "From the preliminary identification, we believe it' s Dr. Eleanor Vance."

My grandmother made a small, wounded sound.

"How?" she asked.

"We can' t say for sure yet," the detective replied, his voice gentle. "But it wasn' t from natural causes. The terrain is rough out there, but her injuries... they don' t match a fall."

A fall. My father had said she was unwell, that she needed care. He' d made it sound like a quiet, sterile place. Not the cold, unforgiving ground of the woods.

The detective continued. "We also found this nearby." He must have shown her something, because my grandmother gasped. "It' s a prototype drone. Badly damaged. Registered to Sterling Dynamics."

The drone. Charlotte' s drone. The one I was framed for losing. It wasn't lost. It was there. With her.

That' s when I knew. It wasn' t an accident. It wasn't a faked disappearance. It was something dark and ugly, orchestrated in the clean, bright halls of my father's company.

The men in the white uniforms came next. They brought a long, black bag on a stretcher. They carried it out of the woods and loaded it into a van. The van was plain, with no windows. It moved slowly down the driveway and turned onto the main road.

I watched it go until it was just a small black dot in the distance. I felt a strange urge to run after it, to stop it, to tell them they had made a mistake. That was my mom in there. She couldn' t be in a bag. She was supposed to be a star.

I pressed my face against the cold glass of the window, trying to see her in the sky, but the lights from the police cars washed everything out. She wasn't there. She was in the van. She was gone.

A deep chill set into my body, a cold that had nothing to do with the night air. I felt small and impossibly alone. My father was somewhere with his new partner, celebrating his freedom. My mother was in a black bag, on her way to a cold, sterile room.

And I was here, in this big, empty house, with a truth that was too heavy for a child to carry. My stomach hurt. My head ached. I wrapped my arms around myself, but I couldn't get warm. I was an island, and the tide of my family's lies was rising all around me.