She stepped backward.
“No.”
I didn’t move.
She shook her head.
“No, that’s not possible.”
“My name is Margaret.”
Her lips trembled.
“I know a woman named Margaret.”
My heart shattered.
“You do?”
“She used to live in my dreams.”
I felt the world tilt beneath my feet.
“What dreams?”
She closed her eyes.
“A kitchen.”
I stopped breathing.
“A woman standing at a sink.”
She opened her eyes.
“She was crying.”
I covered my mouth.
“That was me.”
She stared at me.
“And there was a girl.”
“You.”
“She was angry.”
I nodded.
“She was leaving.”
I began to cry.
“She had a cream-colored bag.”
I whispered, “Yes.”
She looked at the bag sitting on the chair.
Then she looked back at me.
“I don’t remember leaving that night.”
My heart pounded.
“What do you remember?”
She sat down.
“I remember getting into a car.”
“What car?”
“A dark sedan.”
“Who was driving?”
She pressed her hands against her temples.
“I don’t know.”
Then suddenly she gasped.
“There was another person.”
“Who?”
“My father.”
I froze.
Her father and I had divorced when she was thirteen.
He had moved away two years before she disappeared.
After she vanished, he told investigators he had no idea where she could have gone.
I had believed him.
For sixteen years.
“What about your father?” I asked.
She looked frightened.
“He told me you didn’t want me anymore.”
My blood went cold.
“What?”
“He said you had told me to leave.”
I closed my eyes.
Those words.
My words.
But not the way they were being remembered.
I had said them during an argument.
I never meant them.
He apparently had turned them into something else.
But there was still one question.
“If your father was there that night, why did nobody ever find you?”
She stared at me.
“I don’t know.”
Then her eyes widened.
“I think someone helped me disappear.”
Part 4 — The Truth in the Bag
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