For ten years, I lived with questions that had no answers.
What happened to my daughter?
Where had she gone?
Was she alive?
Did she remember me?
And, perhaps most painfully of all, what would she look like if I ever saw her again?
I had learned how to live without answers because there was no other choice.
Then, one ordinary afternoon, a new family moved in next door.
They introduced themselves politely. We exchanged smiles. We talked about the neighborhood, their move, and the new job that had brought them to town.
Everything was painfully normal.
Until their teenage daughter stepped outside.
I looked at her for three seconds.
Three seconds was all it took.
Then I whispered a name that nobody had used around her in ten years.
“Margot?”
The girl stopped halfway up their driveway.
She turned toward me.
“What?”
My husband, Greg, immediately looked at me.
“Nicole?”
I couldn’t answer.
Our new neighbors, Joan and Thomas, had come over that afternoon to introduce themselves. They had moved into the house three days earlier because Thomas had accepted a new job nearby.
Until that moment, the afternoon had been completely ordinary.
There were moving boxes scattered across their yard. Joan had apologized for the mess. Thomas had joked about how long it would take to unpack everything. Their teenage daughter, they had told us, wasn’t exactly thrilled about moving.
