Whereabouts Unknown

Nadia Cole is sent to check on six-year-old Devon. In a cold apartment, he shows her a drawing of his mother asleep and himself beside her, “waiting for her to be up.” Nadia wants to keep him home, but one more bad night and the county has a clean bed ready.

That bed is in a group home thirteen-year-old Kayla Dunlap vanished from six weeks ago. Her file reads whereabouts unknown, and nobody is looking. To Nadia, the paperwork is too clean, and clean is how you lose a child. At the home, a girl on the stairs whispers that the boy before Kayla never ran away at all.

The case takes Nadia back ten years, to a girl of eight she argued into a group home, written off in one word: absconded. Nadia always told herself the girl ran. Believing it kept her going.

Nadia was wrong.