Forty Thousand Dollars Demanded to Bring Our Lost Daughter Home

“Is there a problem?” I asked, twirling my gold wedding ring around my finger. Linda shifted in her chair and looked at the screen again. She did not look directly at me. “I can try to run this from your checking account instead, if you like,” she said, her voice dropping to a quieter register….

“Is that the clinic where her specialist is?” I asked, my voice barely reaching across the table. “It is a fertility specialist,” James said, his pen stopping mid-tap. I looked closer at the second photo, where they were standing near the registration desk in the lobby. Richard was leaning toward her, his face inches from…

“Do not stay up too late,” she said. “I will be up in a few minutes,” I said. She walked out, leaving the door slightly ajar. I looked down at the crystal glass of water sitting on the silver tray. The ice cubes had begun to melt, leaving small beads of condensation running down the…

“This is the joint household account,” I said, my voice barely louder than the hum of the office fluorescent lights. “The one we used for the children’s dental insurance and the grocery bills.” “It was,” Vance said. “Until three weeks before he packed his bags.” He turned to the third page, pointing his pen at…

“Who was the officer who came?” I asked. “A deputy named Miller,” Christopher said. “He didn’t write anything down at first. He just spent ten minutes talking to her in the back of his cruiser while I sat on the curb with my collarbone broken.” I rubbed my left thumb against my silver ring, twisting…

“We need to know how far back this goes,” Carter said. “I ran the reports for September,” Linda said. “It is not just a few dollars here and there. The spreadsheet was filled with long columns of red text, each line representing a transaction that had been deleted from the system after the customer had…