I left a notebook and crayons on the kitchen table and smiled at her.
“Draw me your favorite part of the trip,” I said.
I expected to see the pool, the cat, pancakes — maybe a treehouse or a dock or something silly and bright and normal.
That’s not what I found.
A few hours later, I opened the notebook.
There were four people in the picture.
Rachel. A tall man I had never seen before. A little girl who was not my daughter. And in the darkest corner of the page, drawn apart from all of them, was Sofia.
By herself.
I felt the air leave my body.
At first I told myself maybe it meant nothing. Kids draw strange things. Kids process the world in weird ways.
But deep down, I already knew.
This was not nothing.
I went through her pink backpack.
At the bottom, crumpled between a T-shirt and one of her dolls, I found a receipt.
It wasn’t from Charleston.
It was from a grocery store nearly two hours away, in another county entirely.
And the items on it made my blood run cold.
Baby formula. Diapers. Toddler snacks. Imported beer.
My hands started shaking.
There was no baby at Eleanor’s house.
No toddler.
No reason for any of those things.
That night, I finally got Sofia alone in the living room.