While Robert and Mary wept beside a grave, convinced their daughter might already be dead somewhere in the city, Mary saw something that shattered her soul in an instant: a skinny little girl, wearing worn-out flip-flops and carrying a bag full of cans on her back, walking among the crosses with a gold necklace that only existed on three necks in the entire world. One was hers. Another was Robert’s. And the third must have been hanging from the chest of Luna, her eight-year-old daughter, who had been missing for three days.
Mary got up so fast she almost tripped over her mother’s gravestone. Her face was swollen from crying, her makeup was smeared, and her breath was ragged. For 72 hours, she hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time. She had gone from the prosecutor’s office to press calls, from the cameras outside her house to voicemails from people morbidly asking if they had found the girl’s body yet. Her world, so orderly and so expensive, had rotted away in three days.
“Where did you get that necklace?” she shouted in a voice so desperate that even the birds took flight from the nearby mausoleum.
The girl stopped dead in her tracks. She looked to be about ten years old. Her hair was tangled, her clothes faded from too many washes, and her skin tanned by the sun. Hearing the scream, she dropped the bag, and the cans clanged together with a hollow crash on the cemetery floor. She watched the elegant woman run toward her as if she were a ghost, and behind her, she saw the tall man in the dark coat coming too, his face contorted with grief and his eyes like a father who no longer knew if he was still breathing or just standing there.
