Part 1
For twenty years, I believed my daughter had vanished from a garden in Cairo. One day, I received a postcard from Egypt with an address just five kilometers from my home in Ohio. I thought it would be another cruel reminder of the past, but what I found there revealed that someone I once trusted had kept the truth from me all this time.
The postcard had a Cairo stamp, but the address on the back was nearby. There was no message, no signature, just a sentence written in small capitals: “Come only if you still want to know the truth about Tara.”
My daughter had disappeared in Cairo when she was eight. Now, twenty years later, I was driving toward a row of rental garages with that postcard on the passenger seat, my heart pounding. I found apartment forty-two, lifted the cold metal door, and braced myself for the worst. Instead, I fell to my knees.
There was a woman sitting on a folding chair next to three cardboard boxes. She had my eyes. She looked at me as if she had spent her whole life deciding whether to hate me or not.
“You got here fast, Cassidy,” she said.
She could barely breathe. “Tara?”
Her lips trembled, but didn’t move. “I needed to know if you were coming.”
