11/11/2025
The town of Cedarbrook Hollow, with its misty mornings and quiet, winding roads, was a sanctuary of peace. A place where neighbors knew each other and front doors were left unlocked. It was the kind of place where a child should be safe to ride their bike around the house, their laughter echoing through the trees. But 12 years ago, that peace was shattered for Laura Forester when her eight-year-old daughter, Emily, vanished without a trace.
Emily’s disappearance wasn’t just a headline; it was a wound that never healed. For Laura, the passing of each day was another layer of grief, another memory of a life that was supposed to be. Her marriage crumbled under the weight of an unspoken blame, leaving her alone in a house that was now just a silent monument to her loss. She went through the motions, a pastry chef whose hands, once busy making lunch for her daughter, now kneaded dough to fill a void in her soul.
The case went cold, and the daily calls from Detective Dean Harland dwindled and then stopped altogether. Laura learned to live with the quiet, the emptiness, and the desperate, nagging question of what had happened to her little girl. Until one afternoon, when her phone rang and the familiar name of the detective flashed on the screen, a name she hadn’t seen in years. Her heart, a muscle that had grown numb from grief, suddenly began to race. “Something’s come up,” he told her, and those words, so simple and so full of promise, sent a jolt of both hope and terror through her.
