“We need to get closer,” Margaret said.
“That’s exactly what we said we wouldn’t do.”
“Jon, what if they want to leave and don’t know how? What if they’ve been taught there’s nowhere else?”
Before he could answer, Greenfield reappeared on the porch carrying what was unmistakably a rifle. He stood scanning the hills with slow, suspicious intent.
Jon went still.
“He knows someone’s watching,” he said. “We need to go.”
They drove away carefully, trying not to raise dust.
Only when they reached the main road did Margaret begin speaking again.
“We have to do something.”
“We need proof,” Jon said. “Real proof. Not body language and old names and what we think we saw from a hill.”
“And if we’re right?”
He gripped the wheel harder.
“Then we go to the police.”
That night Margaret wandered the house as if she were carrying too much electricity to sit still. In the girls’ old bedroom, which she had never fully changed, she sat on one of the small beds and stared at the walls still lined with childhood photographs. Three identical faces smiled from birthdays, holidays, summer afternoons, the ordinary little celebrations that make up a family before catastrophe teaches them the cost of the ordinary.
Jon found her there an hour later.
“I keep thinking about that last morning,” she said without looking up. “I told them to stay where I could see them. But I was doing dishes. I wasn’t really watching. I let them down.”
“You did not,” Jon said firmly, sitting beside her on the bed. “You were being a normal parent in a safe neighborhood. This isn’t your fault.”
“If I had been more careful—”
“He would have found another opportunity,” Jon said. “If he wanted to take them, he would have found a way.”
Margaret turned toward him then, tears already sliding down her face.
“You really think it’s them, don’t you?”
He nodded slowly.
“I think the evidence is strong enough that we have to act as though it could be.”
“How?”
“We start with DNA,” he said. “Hair. Saliva. Skin cells on something discarded. Something the police can test.”
The next opportunity came on Saturday.
The market opened beneath a low gray sky and a thin coastal mist that made the awnings and produce displays look slightly unreal, like a town staged for a memory rather than a morning. Margaret and Jon arrived early and positioned themselves near a coffee stand with a clean view of the Strawberry Sisters’ booth.
At 8:30, a battered pickup pulled into the lot.
Margaret’s heart kicked hard at the sight of the 3 young women climbing down from the cab. They moved fast, unloading crates and display boards with a smooth efficiency that suggested this ritual had been repeated too many times to require thought. Even from a distance, Margaret noticed something else.
Tension.
All 3 women kept glancing toward the market entrance. Toward the lot. Toward the edges of the crowd. Their bodies moved with vigilance, not ease.
“They’re watching for someone,” Jon said.
“For him,” Margaret whispered.
For 2 hours they observed. Customers bought strawberries. The sisters smiled politely, answered questions, made change, and returned to their guarded alertness the second any interaction ended. When a man in work clothes approached the stand unexpectedly, all 3 of them stiffened before realizing he only wanted berries.
“They’re afraid,” Margaret said. “Jon, they’re terrified.”
At 10:30, Sarah stepped away from the booth and headed toward the market restroom.
Margaret stood before she had fully decided to.
“What are you doing?” Jon hissed.
“This may be the only chance.”
She crossed the market quickly, reached the restroom building just as Sarah was coming out, and for one breathless second they stood face to face in the mist.
Up close, there was no room left for denial.
The scar on Sarah’s chin sat small and pale where her childhood bicycle accident had left it. Margaret remembered cleaning that cut in their kitchen while Sarah cried more from indignation than pain. The shape of her eyes, the angle of her mouth, the way she shifted her weight from one foot to the other when uncertain—all of it was unbearably familiar.
“Oh,” Sarah said. “You’re the woman from last week. The one who dropped the strawberries.”
“Yes,” Margaret said. “Margaret Harper.”
“And you’re Sarah.”
“That’s right.”
Sarah looked tired beneath the politeness, as if even ordinary conversation required more effort than it should. Margaret began carefully, talking about strawberries, gardening, companion planting. Sarah responded easily enough at first. When Margaret mentioned basil helping repel aphids and spider mites, Sarah brightened.
“Dad taught us that too,” she said.
There was the slightest hesitation before the word dad.
Margaret’s heart pounded louder.
“Has he been farming long?” she asked.
Sarah’s expression tightened.
“Since I was little. Since we were little, I mean. My sisters and I.”
“You must have grown up on the farm.”
“Yes.”
She glanced toward the market.
“We should probably get back. Sophie worries when any of us is away too long.”
Margaret knew she should let her go.
She didn’t.
“Sarah,” she said softly, “do you ever think about your life before the farm?”
The young woman went still.
“What do you mean?”
“Any memories. From when you were very small. Before you lived with your father.”
Sarah’s face changed instantly. Not just surprise. Fear.
“I don’t—why are you asking me that?”
Because I think you’re my daughter.
Because I have waited 15 years to ask you anything at all.
Because the shape of your face is my history and your voice is splitting my life open.
Margaret could not say any of that. So what came out was smaller, stranger, and still too much.
“I think you may remember more than you realize.”
Sarah stepped back.
“I have to go,” she said.
Then she turned and walked quickly away toward the stand.
When Margaret returned to Jon, he took one look at her face and led her immediately behind a vendor truck where they could not be seen from the open market lane.
