Chapter 6: The Foundation

I closed the grants file and didn't open it again for three days.

Verity checked my screen every time she walked past.

So I gave her something to see.

The tip line lived in a windowless room at the end of the hall.

Six desks, six headsets, a whiteboard, and a coffee machine that sounded like it was dying.

The woman who ran it was in her fifties, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a cardigan with a hole in the elbow.

She'd worked the line for nineteen years.

She looked at my legs, then my eye, then my face.

"You're her," she said.

"I'm her."

"Well, sit down before you fall down. Headset's on the hook. We don't hang up on anybody, not even the psychics."

"You get psychics?"

"Twice a week. One of them's been calling about you since 2009. Says you're living on a houseboat in Florida."

"Sounds nice."

"She says you have a parrot."

"I'd like a parrot."

She laughed and handed me a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST VOLUNTEER.

"That one's yours now. Nobody else will touch it."

The others were a retired cop who worked nights and two college girls who did the social media.

And a quiet man who'd lost his son in 1998 and still came in every Tuesday.

They ate lunch together at the long table.

On my first day they made me a plate before I'd figured out where the kitchen was.

On my second day one of the college girls painted my fingernails without asking, pale green, because she said pink was a lot.

I didn't tell her I'd never had painted nails.

I sat very still and let her.

The calls were mostly nothing.

A neighbor's kid with a new haircut.

A man who saw my face on a milk carton in 2004.

A woman crying because her daughter had been gone eleven years and it was her birthday.

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