At 4:07 a.m., I caught my seventeen-year-old daughter slipping back into the house after prom. The moment she noticed me sitting in the darkness, she stopped cold. Then her purse slipped from her hand, and something tumbled out onto the hardwood floor. The second I saw it, my stomach sank.

The grandfather clock on the mantel seemed far louder than usual. Midnight passed, then one o’clock approached, and Ellie still hadn’t come home.

I kept telling myself she was probably delayed. Proms always ran later than expected, right?

Maybe the after-prom gathering had stretched on longer than anyone anticipated. Teenagers weren’t exactly known for keeping track of the time.

But Ellie was different.

That was what made it so unsettling.

She was the type of girl who would text me if she expected to be ten minutes late leaving the library.

In seventeen years, she had never once broken curfew.

She earned excellent grades and avoided trouble.

By one o’clock, I had already sent her two messages. Neither received a response.

I tried again. The familiar delivered notification never appeared.

I paced through the house, desperately searching for some logical explanation for where my daughter might be.

My mind drifted back to earlier that evening when she came downstairs wearing her prom dress, and for a moment I had forgotten how to breathe. Post-promactivities