The drive takes two hours.

  I find the old neighborhood from Sebastian’s obituary. The street. The house has changed hands, different garden, different door, and I don’t let myself feel that. I don’t have time to feel that.

  I ask a neighbor about the caretaker. She lives three streets over. Red door. I knock.

  She opens it and looks at me for a long moment. She has the face of someone who has been carrying something heavy for a very long time.

  “I wondered if you’d come,” she says.

  “Tell me about Elise,” I say. “Please.”

  She lets me in. We sit at her kitchen table. She folds her hands.

  She tells me she worked for Sebastian for twenty years. She was the only one who stayed after I left because she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Elise in that house alone with a man who didn’t know how to look after anything. She watched Elise grow up. She made sure there was food when Sebastian forgot. She checked in when she could.

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  She tells me about the phone calls.

  Sebastian had been calling Elise every Sunday for years. Seven, eight minutes. Grades and monosyllables. But when the calls stopped being answered he didn’t think much of it at first. Young people get busy. Young people go quiet sometimes.

  A month passed.

  He called the caretaker. Asked her to check on Elise’s apartment.

  She tells me what she found when she got there. She tells it plainly, without softening it, and I sit very still throughout. The apartment quiet and clean. The curtains open. A glass of water in the kitchen.

  She tells me about the note on the wall.

  She tells me Sebastian got the call from the police two days later. Autopsy confirmed it. She had been gone for almost a month before anyone found her.

  I sit with that.

  A month, I think. She was gone for a month and nobody knew.

  “Sebastian,” I say.

  “He was never the same after.” The caretaker looks at her hands. “He drank. He stopped going to work. The accident happened eight months later.” She pauses. “I don’t think it was entirely an accident.”

  The room is very quiet.

  I think about Sebastian at the breakfast table, eyes on his phone, not looking up. I think about him at the end of it all, alone in a house that had been empty for twenty years in every way that mattered, finding out his daughter had been gone for a month before anyone noticed.

  He knew what kind of father he was, I think. He knew and he couldn’t carry it.

  “Where is her apartment?” I ask.

  The caretaker looks at me. Then she writes down the address.