“Stevie Nicks. Lindsey Buckingham. Everybody wants to get the band back together.”

“Nice shirt,” he said. He had hazel eyes, like a summer forest—evergreen trees, rich earth, golden sunlight—and they lit up when he smiled or even almost smiled. She had a feeling there was a very different Jeremy Cox underneath the stone-faced TV persona.

“Thanks. Stevie Nicks is my lady and savior.”

His eyebrows slightly lifted. “She’s a little before your time, isn’t she?”

“Stevie Nicks transcends space and time,” she said. “Was that weird? I talk too much when I’m nervous. Or just in general. Can you say something weird so I’ll feel less awkward?”

“I’ve had impure thoughts about Ann Wilson,” he offered. She snorted a laugh. She’d been right. The true Jeremy Cox had peeked out from behind the façade, and she already liked the guy.

“Ann Wilson from Heart? No, that’s not weird. Awesome, but not weird.”

“I tried,” he said, and though he sounded apologetic, she could tell he was trying not to laugh at her.

“Anyway, thanks for letting me talk to you. I promise I won’t take up much of your time, Mr. Cox.”

“Call me Jeremy. You said you’re Emilie?”

She nodded. “Yeah. I’m down from Ohio. We used to be neighbors. I mean Ohio and West Virginia, not, like, you and me personally.”

“Are you going to tell me who’s missing, or do you want me to guess?” The question was abrupt, but she didn’t mind. She wanted to get this over with too.

“My half sister. Kidnapped.”

“Recently?”

“Twenty years ago. If it means anything to you, she was from West Virginia too.”

Clearly, it did mean something to him. “Anything for a fellow Mountaineer. Let’s find somewhere to talk.”

They decided to walk and talk along the trail that led to the other Forest Giants. It was an easy trail, and she was finally able to catch her breath.

“You ever been here before?” she asked Jeremy.

“Never,” he said. “Bit small for people to get lost in. You can hear the highway.”

Had he been in search-and-rescue so long that he judged forests not by their beauty but by how easy or hard it was to get lost in them?

“I almost came here this summer,” she said, pausing to study Little Elena, the daughter of the giant troll family. The figure sat on the ground, playing with a large stone like a toy race car. “Mom and I had this thing we did. Whenever someone died, we’d go into the woods. The first time, this sweet outdoor cat I’d been feeding got hit by a car. We buried him in the backyard, but I couldn’t stand to go back inside the house and act like everything was normal, you know? So Mom took me to a state park, and we walked. We walked until we were too tired to feel sad.” She started walking again, Jeremy right at her side. “Mom died in June. She’d wanted to see the giants, so I thought about coming here, but I couldn’t. Guess I’m doing it now.”

“It’s called ‘searching behavior,’ ” he said. “People who lose someone will find themselves walking for miles or driving for hours…Lots of theories on why. I think it’s guilt. Misplaced usually. We think we should have been able to stop it, but we can’t. Even after they’re gone, your body keeps trying to do something to help even though you can’t.”

His eyes scanned the woods around them as if searching for someone missing. Whoever they were, he didn’t find them and set off walking again. After a few minutes, they reached the last forest giant, Mama Loumari, who leaned back against a tree, her hand resting on her pregnant belly.

“So, tell me about your sister,” he said. “You said she was kidnapped twenty years ago? How old were you?”

“I was three when it happened. But I just learned about it. Technically she’s missing, presumed dead. Never found the body. You need to write this down?” She unzipped her backpack and removed the file she’d brought.

“No,” he said. “How do they know she’s dead if they’ve never found a body?”

“The police say she is. Legally she is. And her kidnapper’s body was found two days later, and my sister never came home, so…”

“How did the kidnapper die? Any chance she killed him?”

“It’s pretty gross. They assume he slipped and fell down a hill while fleeing the scene.”

“How is that gross?”

“When they found his body, birds had pecked out his eyes.”

“Gruesome,” Jeremy said, sounding almost impressed or maybe pleased. “Over here.”

He lightly tapped her arm, indicating she should follow him to a picnic table. She sat on the bench, and he sat across from her, the file folder from her backpack between them.

When she’d first started digging into her half sister’s disappearance, she’d found a profile of Jeremy in Esquire magazine. “The Patron Saint of Lost Girls,” the article was called—the unbelievable true story of a former missing boy who found missing girls. In one photo, Jeremy posed on a reservation road with two Lakota teenagers. He stood with his arms crossed, his black T-shirt showing off his biceps for the cameras. The girls looked small beside him but lovely, proud, and defiant. They’d been abducted by white men from a nearby pipeline worker camp. Tribal police had no luck finding them. State police wouldn’t bother looking, saying they’d likely run away from home. The family had called Jeremy. Thirty-eight hours later, he found them locked in the back room of a trailer. As the article stated, they were only two of the dozens of women and girls he’d rescued over the years.

And if he wouldn’t help her, no one else could.

“All right, what’s her name?” Jeremy asked.

“Shannon. Shannon Katherine Yates. But the first thing you should probably know,” Emilie said, though it was the last thing she wanted to tell him, “is that…I sort of never met her.”

“All right. You have my attention.”

It began with her mother dying of breast cancer in June. It had always been only the two of them, and they’d liked it like that. Emilie always knew she was adopted. That was never a secret, but her mother had asked her to stay away from DNA and ancestry websites, which Emilie never questioned, but maybe she should have. Emilie loved her mom, and her mom loved her. When her mother said, “Maybe don’t do that,” Emilie wouldn’t do it.

So, no looking up relatives on Ancestry or 23andMe. Until her mother died, and she was so lonely she went fishing for family.

“Sorry about your mother,” he said.

“Thanks.” She would’ve said more, but she was trying to get through all this without crying. “Um…anyway, so I did one of those DNA tests—”

“Bad idea?”

“Well…I learned pretty fast why Mom warned me off those sites.”

Emilie had always known the truth about her birth parents. Nobody knew who her father was, and her biological mother suffered from alcohol and drug addiction before her death in a car accident years ago. Sometimes Emilie had wondered about her birth family, but she’d never felt any particular connection to them. Not until her sister.

“So you had your DNA tested and found a half sister?” Jeremy asked.

“The only hits on my DNA were two distant cousins and someone listed as ‘Unknown/Close Relation.’ But there was no info, no one to contact. I was about to give up on the whole thing when I got a private message from a West Virginia homicide detective. He asked me to call his number. I thought it might be a scam, but no—real detective working on cold cases. That ‘Unknown/Close Relation’ was my half sister. He said they wanted to get all my info in case her body was ever found. They could use my DNA to identify her. I didn’t even know I had a half sister. The day I found out about her was the day I found out she’d been kidnapped and murdered.” Emilie ran her fingers through her hair. “I spit in a tube to get my DNA on that site. They got hers from the blood in the trunk of his car, where she’d cut up her hands trying to escape.”

“Wow,” Jeremy said. She was perversely proud of herself for having a story that made the guy with an almost mystical ability to find missing people say Wow.

“Right? I found some old newspaper clippings and stuff about her kidnapping.” She pointed at the file. “Age thirteen, kidnapped by a known sex offender on a Friday after getting off the school bus. By Monday, they’d found his body in the woods. Never found hers.” She took a breath. “My mom’s buried near my house. I walk there every single day. I want to bury Shannon there too. Have a real funeral or something? Even if no one shows up but me, she deserves that.”

Emilie already had the tombstone engraving planned—Shannon Katherine Yates. She deserved a better world than this one.