“Tell Maddie we miss her.”
Mrs. Pruitt said it with a little smile, holding a box of oatmeal in one hand and her basket in the other. We were standing in the cereal aisle at the Kroger on Main Street on a Tuesday afternoon. I had a cart full of groceries and a headache from a long day at work, and I was only half listening.
“I’ll tell her,” I said. “But you’ll see her Thursday anyway.”
Mrs. Pruitt tilted her head.
She has been the librarian at the Carver Public Library since I was fourteen years old. She still wears her silver hair in the same tight bun. She still wears the same little gold glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. When I was a teenager, I used to hide in the back corner of that library for hours, and she always pretended not to notice that I was crying.
“Thursday?” she said.
“She’s there every Thursday. Five-thirty to eight. Homework.”
Mrs. Pruitt looked at me over her glasses for a long moment. The kind of look she used to give kids who tried to sneak candy into the reading room.
“Honey,” she said gently. “She hasn’t been in since March.”
The cereal aisle went very quiet. Somewhere, a shopping cart squeaked. A little kid was crying about Lucky Charms. The music on the store speakers was playing some old song about a rainy night.
“That’s not possible,” I said. “I drop her off. Every Thursday. I watch her walk in the front doors.”
“She might walk in the front doors,” Mrs. Pruitt said carefully. “But she doesn’t stay. She used to sit at the table by the window with her books. Every week, right up through the winter. Then one Thursday in March she stopped coming. I thought maybe she’d gotten busy. Started a sport or something.” She paused. “I’ve missed her. She’s a lovely girl. She reminds me of you.”
I couldn’t say anything.
“Erin?” Mrs. Pruitt put her hand on my arm. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
I left my cart right there in the middle of the aisle. Milk. Eggs. Bread. A rotisserie chicken. A box of the granola bars Maddie likes. I just left it and walked out of the store.
I sat in my car in the parking lot for twenty minutes without starting it.
My hands were on the steering wheel. My keys were in my lap. I was staring at the front of the Kroger, at people coming in and out with their bags, and I couldn’t make my brain work.
Since March. It was the second week of June.
Three months. Twelve Thursdays. Twelve times I had pulled up in front of those big glass doors at eight o’clock, and twelve times my daughter had come walking out with her backpack over her shoulder, climbed into my car, and said, “It was fine.”
Where had she been?
I thought of every bad thing a mother can think of.
Drugs. Kids at her school were vaping in the bathrooms. I’d read the emails from the principal. Maybe she’d gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd.
A boy. An older boy. Some sixteen-year-old with a car and a smile who told her she was mature for her age.
Or worse. Much worse. Some grown man she’d met online. Some stranger who’d been talking to her on her phone at night while I slept in the next room. Some man who knew exactly what to say to a quiet, lonely fourteen-year-old girl who read too many books.
I put my forehead down on the steering wheel and tried to breathe.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.