Three days after she arrived back in England, Emily got a text from an unknown number.

I’m sorry the hotel didn’t work out. However, I understand the need to regroup. I trust this first installment will take the pressure off.

Her stomach flipped. She immediately checked her banking app and saw that an obscene amount of money had been deposited into her checking account. A second text followed a few minutes later.

Enjoy your visit. Your parents have a beautiful home.

Leaping off her bed, she ran to the window and pressed her face to the glass. She scanned the pavement, the bus stop, the cars, and the bushes, expecting to see a flash of silk tie or a glint of gold watch. But the street was empty.

Without even a second’s hesitation, she dialed the unknown number and waited, listening first to a gaping silence and then to a recorded message informing her that the number she had dialed was not available. She tried Scott’s usual number, the one she couldn’t quite bring herself to delete, but got the same message. Disconnected.

* * *

In her first days back, Emily spent a huge amount of time on the internet. She couldn’t help it. She Googled Amandine Tessier compulsively, reading every available article and interview she could find. She watched old news reports showing grainy images of a seaside town beset by a storm. The reporters talked about freak weather conditions, explaining how initially police had assumed that Amandine had been swept into the ocean—knocked out by a falling object, perhaps, her little body unheeded in the melee. But then two tourists had come forward claiming they’d seen her. A man who’d been in the private beach area with his children, and a backpacker on the promenade.

“It was her,” said the man. “I’m sure of it.”

“She was on the road,” said the backpacker. “A woman was carrying her. Then the tree came down and almost hit them. I tried to help. There were flames everywhere.”

Neither of the witnesses, however, could provide a positive ID for the woman. They hadn’t seen her face; she’d been carrying a large umbrella and wearing a hat, but they couldn’t agree on what kind, and couldn’t even guess at her age.

“She was wearing sunglasses,” said the man.

“It was hard to see through all the rain and smoke,” said the backpacker.

CCTV footage had been useless. As well as igniting trees, the lightning had knocked out a crucial section of the network, and the surviving cameras were no help. They showed hundreds of hooded figures dashing into doorways and diving into cars with hats and towels thrown over their heads, many of them carrying children.

Nina, it seemed, had been extremely lucky.

Of course, once the word got out that the disappearance was being treated as an abduction, the phone calls came flooding in, all describing sightings of a red-haired child at the beach, at the shops, at the cinema. They reported a man dragging a child, a woman smacking a child, a child all alone, a child crossing the road, getting into a car, eating ice cream, running, screaming, falling, crying. People posted photos of their neighbors online, pointing out that the DuPonts or the Wilsons or the Garcias who just moved in across the road, they had a daughter or a niece or a cousin with heterochromia, could she be Amandine? Several citizen’s arrests were made in shopping centers and doctor’s surgeries, young mothers detained and interrogated on account of their daughters’ different-colored eyes. Police had apparently spent years trying to follow up on all the leads, but astonishingly, no one had seen anything significant.

“If you have any information at all,” said a coiffed TV presenter in a colorful studio, “please call the help line.”

Emily pored over every blog, support-group forum, and crazy conspiracy website. She watched endless videos of press conferences. Amandine’s family, their faces waxen and pinched in the flashing white light. Her siblings, sad and small. She replayed the footage over and over until she knew each video by heart. She watched Nicolette Tessier break down over and over again, weeping into a bouquet of microphones.

Emily clicked on more links. A famous singer, an international star heavily involved with children’s charities, had paid the case some lip service, and the Storm Child made global headlines. There were late-night panel-show discussions and social-media debates. But no amount of talk could bring Amandine back, nor could it produce any further clues as to her whereabouts. Her body was never found, and eventually it was decided that the ocean must have claimed her after all.

Emily also spent a lot of time missing Nina. She thought about the way she laughed, the way she spoke. The way she knew exactly what to say when Emily was feeling low. She thought about all the conversations they’d had. Emily had shared her innermost secrets. They weren’t very nice, apparently. Hit me and stuff. I don’t remember it. She’d never told anyone that.

She’d never spoken about her therapy, either, not with anyone other than her parents. They thought my body might have retained some memory of the abuse. Not the kind of memory we have as adults or older children. Something different. There’s a word for it. That word, she remembered, was “implicit.” Dr. Forte had once tried to explain it. Past experiences recalled subconsciously. Trauma stored and encoded as pictures or physical sensations. Splinters of memories, slicing into the mind. The body keeps the score, she’d said.

Emily returned to Google and searched for information on early childhood trauma. She realized that even though there was very little chance Aurelia explicitly remembered that fateful day in Nice, she was reliving her abduction on an almost daily basis. Every time she heard thunder or got caught in the rain or was touched in a particular way, her body remembered—and it reacted. Sometimes that reaction took the shape of an emotional outburst; other times it would manifest as a fixation or a phobia. Or a bloody great bonfire. Either way, everything led back to what had happened … which posed unsettling questions about Emily’s own behavioral patterns. The tantrums, the nightmares, the visits to Dr. Forte’s office. The panic attacks. The flurry. The heavy object. It made her wonder: what exactly was she reliving? What did her body remember?

* * *

On the twelfth day after her return to England, Emily woke up filled with a burning sense of purpose. She got up, got dressed, and spent the morning on her parents’ computer, downing cup after cup of instant Nescafé. She scribbled notes in a spiral-bound notebook. She made a phone call. Then she grabbed her wallet and caught the bus into the village.

In the supermarket, she filled her basket with cod fillets, jasmine rice, and feta cheese. She bought tomatoes, garlic, zucchini, eggplant, a fat bunch of mint, and the most expensive bottle of wine in the shop. At the self-service checkout, she waved her card over the card reader. This time, unsurprisingly, she had no problem paying.

Then she crossed the road to the bank, where she gave her account details to a cashier whose pinched mouth and downturned eyes made Emily wonder what kind of life she’d led. What’s your story? she thought as the woman tapped mechanically at her keyboard. What secrets are you hiding? Everyone was carrying something, she was beginning to realize. The world was a much darker and more complicated place than she’d ever thought.

“Are you sure you want to close this account, dear?” asked the cashier, doubtfully.

Emily nodded.

“And what would you like to do with the, er, closing balance.”

Emily told her.

The cashier blanched. “All of it?”

“All of it. These,” Emily slid a piece of paper under the partition, “are the payee details.”

The cashier raised her eyebrows and mumbled something about wonders never ceasing.

Other than the odd coin thrown in a jar, Emily had never donated to charity before, and the feeling it gave her was like stepping into a warm bath. She decided to focus on that, rather than on the little voice inside that whispered, What have you done, you crazy stupid fool?

The right thing, she told the voice, slamming a mental door in its face.

The representative she’d spoken to on the phone earlier had been comforting. “I wish there were more people like you,” he’d said, once he realized she wasn’t joking. “On behalf of Missing People UK, I’d like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”

Leaving the bank, Emily caught sight of her reflection in the huge square windows. She looked taller, somehow. Lighter.

* * *