Page 92 of Two Hit Wonder

Nothing.

She checked Mo's room. The door was open, which was the first wrong thing. Mo never left her door open. The room itself was a mess of clothes and textbooks and wires, exactly as it always was. But there was no Mo.

The bathroom was empty. The kitchen was empty. The living room, where Iona had left Mo that morning with instructions to do her homework and maybe consider being a human being again, was also empty.

"Mo?" Louder this time. "This isn't funny. Come out."

Still nothing.

Iona's stomach began to tighten. She checked her phone. No messages. She called Mo's number and listened to it ring, ring, ring, then click to voicemail. Mo's recorded voice, bored and slightly annoyed, told her to leave a message after the beep.

She tried again. Same result.

She texted: Where are you? Call me back.

Nothing.

She called Mo's friend Jasmine, who was the only one whose number she had even though the two of them went to different secondary schools now, but she hadn't seen her. She called Bethany, the school counselor, who said she thought Mo had gone home. She stared at her phone and didn’t know who else to call.

The tightening in her stomach had become a fist.

So she called Shepherd.

"Mo's gone," she said when he answered. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. Too calm. Like she was reading lines from a script. "She's not here. She's not answering her phone. None of her friends know where she is."

"Gone gone, or teenage dramatic exit gone?"

"I don't know. There's no note. Her phone goes straight to voicemail now."

A pause. Then Shepherd's voice, sharp and focused, the way it got when he was in crisis mode. "I'll call the school. See if they know anything. You call anyone else you can think of. Teachers, parents of friends, anyone."

"Okay."

"Iona. We'll find her."

She wanted to believe him.

Hours passed. Or maybe it was minutes. Time had stopped making sense. The flat felt enormous and empty, and every second that ticked by was another second where anything could be happening and Iona didn't know where her daughter was.

She made tea she didn't drink. She checked Mo's room again, looking for clues like some sort of desperate amateur detective. Mo's school bag was gone. So was her phone charger. Her favorite hoodie was missing from its usual spot on the floor.

She'd planned this. Whatever this was. Did that make things better or worse?

Shepherd called back.

"Nothing from the school. No one's seen her since the final bell." He hesitated. "Iona, I had a thought."

"What?"

"Could she have gone to Scotland? To Maeve?"

Iona's brain stalled. "What? No. That's ridiculous. She barely knows Maeve."

"She knew enough to like her. She wouldn’t stop talking about that damn stretch Limo jaunt. And she knew Maeve was in Scotland. If she wanted to run away, really run away, somewhere no one would think to look…"

"She doesn't even know the address."

"She's fourteen. She has the internet. And she's smarter than both of us combined."