My husband became quieter.
I became obsessed with details.
Every report about an unidentified young woman caught my attention.
Every supposed sighting.
Every message from a stranger claiming they had seen Nora in a grocery store, a train station, or a bus terminal.
Most of them led nowhere.
Some were cruel.
Eventually, I stopped going near beaches.
I couldn’t hear waves without being pulled back to that afternoon.
So when Michael suggested we spend a weekend in a coastal town nearly six hundred miles from home, I immediately said no.
He asked again.
“It doesn’t have to be about the beach.”
“It is literally a beach town.”
“We can eat. Walk around. Sit somewhere. If you hate it, we leave.”
I looked at him.
He looked exhausted.
We were both in our forties by then.
And we had spent eight years building our lives around someone who wasn’t there.
