THREE MONTHS MISSING

Barbara Matthews hadn't slept through the night since September.

She'd tried everything — warm milk, herbal tea, the sleeping pills her doctor prescribed that made her feel like she was walking through chest-deep water. Nothing worked. Every night around two in the morning she'd wake with a start, heart loud in the dark, reaching for her phone to check for messages that never came.

Three months. Ninety-two days since Bron had called to say he was going camping. Ninety-two days since she'd heard his voice, heard him say Love you, Mom the way he always did at the end of their conversations — casual, almost embarrassed, but always there. He'd never once missed it. Not since he was seventeen and had started saying it without being asked.

She had always thought of herself as a practical woman. Rancher's daughter, rancher's wife for twenty-two years, mother of two sons she'd largely raised alone after Frank left — not because she'd failed at anything but because Frank had been the kind of man whose restlessness eventually outran his commitments, and she'd made peace with that years ago. She did not catastrophize. She did not borrow trouble. She had the Montana disposition toward silence and forward motion that came from growing up in a place where the winter was long and the land was hard and you did what needed doing without spending too much time on how you felt about it.

Ninety-two days had tested that disposition to its foundation.

Ninety-two days of nothing.

She sat at the kitchen table now, a cold cup of coffee in front of her, watching the December light push through the curtains. The house felt wrong in a way it hadn't even after Frank left. Frank's absence had been a different kind of wound — sharp and clean, the kind you could name and eventually learn to carry. His chair at the table still felt like his chair, but it was a memory, a closed thing. This was different. This was waiting. Not knowing. The specific cruelty of a silence that might mean anything — and every morning she woke and reached for her phone and the silence was still there, unchanged, ninety-one days becoming ninety-two becoming ninety-three, and she got up and made coffee and kept going because that was what you did, even when the going felt like walking through a house where every room had something missing and you couldn't stop noticing.

Her phone buzzed. Derek.

Call me when you're up. Found something.

Barbara dialed before she could think.

"Derek? What is it? Did you find—"

"Mom. Breathe." Her older son's voice was steady, the way it always was in a crisis — he'd gotten that from his father, the ability to go still when everything else was falling apart. "I didn't find Bron. But I found something. I'm coming over."

"What kind of something?"

A pause. The careful kind.

"Something that doesn't make sense. Thirty minutes."