The piece of CD kept slipping out whenever I tried to turn it. My shoulder burned, and the pain began to crawl up the side of my neck. Finally I found the point where I generated enough force to keep the shard in the slot and turn. A spark of happiness traced through me as I twisted the plastic. And then it snapped into two pieces, neither of them bigger than an inch across.

The sound roused Savannah. She swore. “There has to be something else we can use.” She awkwardly pushed herself to her feet. In the kitchen area, she rattled the cupboard door. “Why won’t this open?”

“There’s a latch. I guess you wouldn’t want all your glasses falling out every time the RV took a turn.” My fingers reached past her and pressed down on the plastic hook so that the door swung open. “Are you hungry?”

She swallowed hard at the sight of my food: SpaghettiOs, canned tuna and peaches, generic Wheat Thins, and a jar of peanut butter, as well as a glass and a plastic plate. “No,” she said shortly.

“You should be,” I said. “I ate while you were sleeping, but it’s been at least twenty-four hours since you did.”

With her good hand, she waved away the suggestion. “Please stop talking about food.”

She managed to unlatch the single drawer tucked under the counter by herself. It was filled with a jumble of junk, including two metal spoons and a spork. She tried the corners of the spoon handles in a screw slot, but they were too big. After putting them back, Savannah looked at me with bleary eyes. “How much longer do we have until the sun comes up?”

In the hallway, I squinted up at the dark sky. Was it getting lighter? “I don’t know. But it does seem like it’s been a long time since it got dark.”

Aimlessly, I pawed through the junk drawer. And then I saw it, wedged in the back corner. The metal potato peeler. It barely worked, taking big chunks of apple or potato along with the skin. But what about the rounded tip that was meant to dig out bruises? Could it also dig us out of here?

Ignoring the ache in my shoulder from holding my hand above my head for so long, I set it in another screw. The peeler was so flimsy that it bent in my grip as I twisted it. But eventually it loosened the third screw. Long minutes later, the fourth was free. I was starting to think that it all might actually work. There were only two more screws. If we could just climb out before Sir noticed and then find a weapon before Rex found us, maybe we would stand a chance.

But when I started on the remaining screws, they refused to budge. I pushed the peeler so hard that it broke, cutting the tips of my index and middle fingers. Pressing them against the palm of my other hand to stop the bleeding, I looked down at Savannah, curled up on the stained carpet, to see what she thought we should do now. The sound of her breathing, soft and regular, made me realize that she was asleep. I crouched to wake her. But what was the point? The screws weren’t budging. I found myself lying down next to her.

I don’t know how many hours went by. When I woke up, Savannah was swearing as she looked at the two remaining screws. “They’re both stripped!”

I got to my feet and looked at the vent, squinting. I realized it was easier to see the screws because the sun had risen. Both screws were no longer topped with crosses. Now they were more like circles.

“But there are only two left.”

Tears sparkled in her eyes. “It doesn’t matter if there are two or twenty. There aren’t edges to work against anymore.”

And then things went from bad to worse. Outside, Rex began to bark.

After dropping to the floor, I scurried to the door. I pressed my eye to the tiny sliver where the tarp had slipped across the window. Through it, I saw Sir. A lightning bolt of fear shot down my spine. He was coming back.

“Get back into bed,” I scream-whispered at Savannah, who was staring at me with blurry eyes. “Get back into bed and pretend you’re still unconscious.”

AMY DOWD

When I got the phone call about Savannah Taylor, the missing girl, I hadn’t thought about my Jenny for almost ninety minutes. Which was nearly a record.

Especially on a Saturday. On weekdays at the bank, I could lose myself in the minutiae of the day. Talk to customers about the houses and cars they were buying, nod along as they enumerated the merits of wrap-around porches and side-curtain air bags.

In my desk drawer was a photo of a four-year-old Jenny. She had her arms wrapped tight around my neck and her head tucked into my shoulder. Looking at that photo hurt. Physically hurt. It set off a hollow ache in my chest and stomach, even my arms and legs.

But that wasn’t the reason I had hidden it away. No, I had done it so that no one would ask about her. I’d also changed my nameplate and business cards to my maiden name, even though the divorce wasn’t finished yet. I couldn’t deal with the way people looked at me when they saw the name Dowd.

The pain was no longer fresh and raw. Now it was like a throb, as constant as the hidden beat of my heart.

I always hoped that Jenny would come to me in a dream. But she never did. Bob said she had for him. Why not me? Was she mad that I had accepted her death?

Over the past ten months, I’d gained twenty pounds. Eating mindlessly helped my brain go quiet, as I rhythmically chewed and swallowed until the bag or box or bowl was empty. And there was no point in working out, in running on a treadmill to nowhere.

No matter how I spent my time, I was always one minute farther away from Jenny. And the space between us just kept getting wider.

It wasn’t like she had fallen through the cracks. Night after night, her disappearance was the lead story on the local news and then the national news. A pretty white teen from an intact family? The media ate that up.

The cops used dogs, helicopters, psychologists, hypnotists, and even a psychic who offered her services for free. They searched creeks and abandoned buildings. Questioned known child molesters. Staked out Island Tan at the exact time and day Jenny had disappeared, questioning anyone who might have heard or seen something.

Only they turned up nothing.

They lifted hundreds of fingerprints from the tanning shop and, one by one, ran them through the system. A few turned out to belong to people with criminal records, mostly girls who had shoplifted. A sizable percentage belonged to unknown people.

It was like Jenny had been teleported into a different dimension. I still lay awake at night trying out different scenarios. Had the dad or boyfriend of a client taken sick notice of her? Or was it someone she knew well? Had someone robbed the place and then decided to take the only witness as well? Was it even possible that she had left, run off with the money from the register? But her phone never pinged, and how far could you get on a couple of hundred dollars?

At work, I sometimes let myself pretend that she was at school. On weekends, I might imagine for a few hours that she was at a friend’s house. My counselor called these thoughts “defensive delusions.”

Pretending was the only way I could summon the energy to draw up contracts or make a simple meal, but there were times the mental game was so easy it scared me.

“Is it normal?” I’d asked the counselor at our last appointment. “Is this something other people do?”

“There is no normal,” she had said. “There are only things that allow you to survive.”