When a four-day storm shears thirty feet of bluff above Santa Barbara’s dog beach, it is Bear—not Floss—who finds the remains and lies down in the wet sand beside them.
They have been there twenty-eight years, and the careful, inexpensive mid-nineties dental work belongs to the man who sold Lila her practice: Casey Marsh, twenty-two, a waitress on Stearns Wharf whose 1998 disappearance was dismissed in three newspaper paragraphs as a girl who meant to leave.
The town believed there was no foul play; Casey’s mother never did.
Lila now has an unread chart, a retired dentist who wrote down exactly what he saw and has carried it ever since, and a seventy-nine-year-old woman on the Westside who wants that name said out loud in a room with his face in it.
Nate has been offered the job he wanted before everything went wrong in Washington—three thousand miles away, starting in September—and Lila has never asked anyone to stay.
