A familiar laugh could make my hands shake.
Dark hair seen from behind could ruin my entire afternoon.
I kept Gia’s toothbrush in our bathroom for nine years.
Removing it felt like giving up.
Eventually, leaving it there felt absurd.
I left it anyway.
I even renewed her library card twice.
The librarian looked confused the second time.
“Is she still using it?”
“She might.”
That was all I could say.
Detective Pruitt called regularly until he retired.
There were sightings.
Rumors.
Scams.
Once, a man in Nevada emailed me a photograph of a young woman standing beside a motel pool.
You couldn’t see her face.
He said it was Gia.
He demanded four hundred dollars for more photographs and her location.
For about thirty terrible seconds, I considered paying.
Then I called police.
It led nowhere.
Most tips did.
Someone swore Gia was working in Tennessee.
Another person claimed she had joined a religious group in Arizona.
Every possibility brought her back for a moment.
Every dead end took her away again.
By the fifth year, people stopped saying Gia’s name around me.
I refused to stop.
When someone asked whether I had children, I said yes.
When I talked about the past, I said her name.
Gia.
I would not let my daughter become a silence everyone politely avoided.
Sixteen years passed like that.
