“What happened?” she says.
Nolan’s breath is warm at her neck. “We’ll find her. She’s our baby. We have to.”
Lyla pulls away from him and looks at Courtney—pale, wan, by-the-book Courtney, whose only job was to keep Fidelity safe. Out of the knot of emotions tearing at Lyla’s insides, anger emerges. Her hands ball into fists; her teeth clench. She can actually feel the veins pressing against her skin. It’s a relief, really, the anger, compared to everything else. It is, at least, something she’s experienced before. She says it again, directly to Courtney. “What happened?”
“I went to pick her up at school, and she was just . . . she was gone. No one saw her leave. Not her teachers, not anybody. They think it happened during recess.”
“Wait, what?”
“I went to pick—”
“She was gone when you got there? The teachers . . .” She whirls around to Nolan. “Isn’t that why we moved here in the first place? To keep her safe? Oh my God. Oh my God! Oh dear God I want to . . . Where the fuck is she?”
“Shhh.”
“Don’t you dare fucking shush me, Nolan.”
Lyla can feel dozens of eyes on her. She wants to put her fist through a wall. To break everything in the room and burn it down, burn the whole house down and disappear. Again. “Where is Fidelity?” she says.
The young woman approaches her. “Ms. McCord, I’m Shelby Martin, and I’m with the state police. These gentlemen are with the FBI, and I assure you, we are doing everything in our power to find your daughter.”
Lyla blinks at her. She looks about twelve.
“It’s still very early. The officers here have canvassed the area around your daughter’s school. Every member of the faculty and staff has been questioned. It’s a private school in a very quiet loca—”
“I know where my daughter goes to school.”
Nolan gapes at her, but Shelby Martin remains unfazed. “What I’m saying is, there were no reports of any strange people or cars in the area.” She says it very calmly. “It’s possible that your daughter simply walked away from the school of her own accord. We’re spreading out into the woods behind the school. The woods are quite deep, so this may take some time.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Lyla says. “She wouldn’t walk away. She wouldn’t do that to us.”
“That’s what I told Detective Martin,” Courtney says. “It’s not like Fidelity to do something like that.”
Lyla glares at Courtney. Grits her teeth.
Nolan says, “She could have gone exploring and got lost.”
“Fidelity doesn’t explore,” Lyla says. “She stays where it’s safe. She’s been taught that. I’ve—we’ve taught her that. Haven’t we, Nolan?”
Shelby Martin says something about Fidelity not having a cell phone they can track, and Lyla’s reply sounds more indignant than she intends it to. “She’s eight.”
Nolan says, “We wanted her to have as normal a life as possible. It’s why we live here and not Hollywood. It’s one thing we’ve agreed on, ever since she was born.”
This is all press release stuff, none of it true. Fidelity had asked for a cell phone at six, and Nolan, FaceTiming from Madagascar, hadn’t thought it such a bad idea. When Lyla had said no—thinking more of trackers and hackers than preserving her daughter’s childhood—Nolan had called her paranoid, sparking a huge fight over Nolan’s lack of sensitivity and understanding when it came to the very real emotional issues that Lyla had battled, issues that affect many women, many human beings. What’s next? Lyla had yelled at the screen. Are you going to call me hysterical?
Honestly, there are few things that can make a person feel emptier than arguing with one’s abnormally laid-back husband on FaceTime. And yet he’s here. And Fidelity is not . . .
Lyla says, “Is there anything we can do to help?”
Shelby Martin has large doe eyes and full apple cheeks. Even with her hair slicked back into a tight bun and the high-collared gray silk blouse she wears with her black suit, she still looks more like a babysitter than a detective—a teenager, dolled up for a school play. Lyla is probably five years older than she is, at the most. But Lyla feels as though the gap could be measured in decades. Centuries. “Keep communicating with us, ma’am,” Shelby Martin says. “Tell us everything you know about Fidelity. Everything you remember.”
Day Three
It’s strange how equalizing fear can be. Lyla and Nolan are stars by any definition, with an Oscar and four Golden Globes between them and a combined net worth of $250 million. But alone in their dark kitchen at 3:00 a.m., their cell phones and the landline as silent as the night, they are a couple with a missing child, like any couple anywhere with any missing child. They have nothing.
Lyla gazes up at the skylight, the stars shining down on her like mocking eyes. Please bring her back. Please don’t make me live without her.
“Ly,” Nolan says. “Do you think Fidelity was unhappy?”
Lyla closes her eyes. “Why would you say that?”
“Detective Martin said she may not have been kidnapped. She may have run away.”
“Yeah, well, Detective Martin is a child.”
“That FBI guy said it too.”
“Who trusts the FBI? I think we should hire a private investigator.”
“But she could have,” he says. “Fidelity could have run away. We don’t know what’s been going through her mind.”
“Fidelity loves us. We’ve given her a great life. She wouldn’t run away. Why would anybody with so much to be grateful for just . . . disappear . . .” Lyla stops herself. She knows what Nolan is going to say.
“You did, Lyla. You disappeared.”
Lyla exhales. He’s right, of course. Nine years ago, she walked off the set of a hit teen TV show, ending not only her career but a budding relationship with her sweet and handsome costar. She disappeared, leaving behind reports of addictive behavior and severe mental health disorders, speculation that she’d joined a cult in the California desert, an ashram in Tibet, that she was homeless on the streets of Toronto, that she was dead. There were threats of a lawsuit from the show’s producers, endless speculative items on TMZ and in the tabloids, hundreds of unanswered texts from her manager and her agent and, of course, from the sweet, handsome costar. She never responded to any of it. Instead, she stayed disappeared until all the fuss faded and people stopped caring or even thinking about her, and she realized that it was even worse than being under the microscope, the feeling of being invisible. Only then did Lyla text the costar, whose name, of course, was Nolan Carnes.
I had a baby. It’s yours.
Nolan begged her to come back. And when she did, with their baby, he proposed.
Lyla married Nolan in a private ceremony on the grounds of a French château owned by a music mogul, their six-month-old daughter, Fidelity, the only guest. They took a few photos, which they sold exclusively to People magazine for $1.2 million, donating it all to a charity for orphaned children.
Before the ceremony, after, and in all the years since, Nolan has never asked where Lyla went for that year or how she managed to stay hidden before and after she’d had the baby. She’s given one short interview about it, to People, the same day as the wedding—and even that contained no specifics. It was the year I found myself, she told the reporter. It was the year I became a mother.