Liam
“Hello?” he called, his voice echoing in the emptiness.
“In the kitchen,” Beth answered, her tone subdued.
“You didn’t find her,” Maddie said flatly. Not a question.
Maddie turned away, resuming her search of another drawer. “I can’t find Betty Bear,” she muttered, her voice tight with emotion. “She’s not anywhere.”
Liam looked questioningly at Beth, who gave a small shake of her head. “We’ve been looking all morning,” she explained quietly. “Turned the house upside down.”
Maddie’s eyes — so like Kate’s it sometimes stole his breath — were rimmed with red as she continued her increasingly desperate search. “She has to be here. She’s always here.” Her voice cracked slightly. “I need her.”
The bear had been Maddie’s constant companion since her fifth birthday — the last present Kate had given her before she died.
“When did you notice she was missing?” Liam asked, helping Maddie close the drawer she’d been rifling through.
“This morning,” Maddie answered, moving to check under the table again. “I went to get her from my special shelf, but she wasn’t there. She’s not anywhere.”
From her stool, Hailey made a small noise, something between a hiccup and a whimper. Liam glanced over, noticing how his younger daughter had suddenly become intensely focused on her coloring, her head bowed low.
“Hailey?” he asked, recognizing the telltale signs. “Do you know where Betty Bear is?”
Hailey’s crayon stilled, but she didn’t look up. Her shoulders hunched slightly, as if trying to make herself smaller.
“Hailey,” Maddie said, immediately alert to her sister’s behavior. “What did you do with Betty Bear?”
“I didn’t mean to make you sad,” Hailey whispered, still not looking up.
Maddie rushed to her sister’s side. “Where is she? Did you hide her?”
Hailey finally lifted her face, her expression a mixture of guilt and defiance. “I gave her to Sunny,” she admitted in a small voice.
“You what?” Maddie’s face flushed with anger.
“Sunny was sad!” Hailey protested, tears welling in her eyes. “She was trying not to cry when she was packing, but I could see she was going to. And — and Betty Bear makes you feel better when you’re sad.” Her chin quivered. “I just wanted to help her not be sad.”
Maddie’s anger deflated as quickly as it had risen, replaced by a defeated slump of her shoulders. “Now they’re both gone,” she said.
Liam wrapped an arm around Maddie, pulling her close. “We’ll find Sunny,” he promised. “And when we do, we’ll get Betty Bear back too.”
But even as he said the words, doubt gnawed at him. Without any leads, finding Sunny felt like an impossible task, a search for a needle in an endless haystack.
“I’m sorry, Maddie,” Hailey said, sliding off her stool to join them. “I was being sneaky. Sunny was in the bathroom, and her bag was on the floor. I tucked Betty Bear way down at the bottom so she’d find her later and not be lonely.”
Something prickled at the back of Liam’s mind — a half-formed thought, a ghost of possibility.
“Maddie,” Liam said, turning to his older daughter. “Betty Bear — isn’t she the one we kept losing? At the park, and then at the restaurant?”
Maddie nodded, confusion replacing her sadness. “Yeah. You said she was a bear magnet for trouble.”
Liam’s heart began to race. “And what did I do after we left her at the restaurant that last time? To make sure we could find her if she got lost again?”
Maddie’s eyes widened as realization dawned. " You put the special beepy thing in her tummy.”
“The air tag,” Liam confirmed, already fumbling for his phone, fingers trembling slightly as he navigated to the tracking app he’d downloaded months ago and nearly forgotten.
Hailey looked between them, bewildered by this sudden shift. “What’s happening?”
“If Betty Bear is with Sunny,” Liam explained, his eyes fixed on the loading screen, “then the tracker inside Betty Bear might tell us where Sunny is.”
Beth moved closer, hope flickering across her usually composed features. “Can it really work? After all this time?”
“The battery lasts for months,” Liam said, willing the app to load faster. The small spinning wheel seemed to mock him, each rotation stretching into eternity.
“Come on,” he muttered, staring at the screen. “Come on.”
The girls crowded against him, their bodies tense with anticipation. An error message flashed across the screen: “Unable to connect. Check network connection.”
“No, no, no,” Liam hissed, his hand gripping the phone so tightly his knuckles whitened. He tapped the retry button, his heart pounding in his ears. The spinning wheel returned, taunting him with each slow rotation.
“Is it broken?” Hailey asked, her small voice quavering.
“Just needs a minute,” Liam reassured her, though uncertainty gnawed at him. What if the battery had died? What if the signal was too weak? What if this last, fragile thread of hope was about to snap?
The app finally loaded, but displayed only a gray map with no signal. “Searching for device…” flashed at the bottom of the screen.
“Maybe it’s too far away,” Maddie whispered, disappointment already creeping into her voice.
Beth placed a steadying hand on Liam’s shoulder. “Give it time.”
Seconds ticked by like hours. The search radius on the map expanded once, twice, three times. And then — a faint blue dot appeared, blinking weakly at the edge of the screen. It disappeared, then reappeared, as if struggling to maintain connection.
“There!” Maddie gasped.
“Wait,” Liam cautioned, hardly daring to breathe. The signal flickered again, vanished for three agonizing seconds, then suddenly solidified — a strong, steady blue dot approximately 120 kilometers from their current location.
Active. The tracker was fully active. Betty Bear was out there, somewhere near Lake Willow, according to the map.
And if Betty Bear was there…
“Is that where Sunny is?” Maddie asked.
Liam stared at the pulsing blue light on his screen, a lighthouse beacon guiding him through the fog of loss and regret.
“I think so,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.
He looked at Hailey, awe replacing his earlier concern. “Hailey, you wonderful, brilliant girl. You might have just saved us all.”
“I did?” Hailey straightened, confusion giving way to tentative pride.
“You did.” Liam wrapped an arm around each of his daughters, drawing them close. “You were trying to be kind — wanting to comfort Sunny when she was sad. And now that kindness might be the thing that brings her home to us.”
Maddie looked up at him, a cautious hope in her eyes that nearly broke his heart. “Are you going to go get her?”
The blue dot on his screen pulsed steadily, like a heartbeat.
Lake Willow. Two hours away. Liam glanced at his watch — it was nearly 6 PM.
By the time he got there, it would be dark.
The rational thing would be to wait until morning, to get some sleep, to approach this crucial moment with a clear head.
For a brief second, he considered it. What if he arrived exhausted, fumbling his words, unable to properly express everything in his heart?
What if his fatigue made him seem insincere?
But then a more terrifying thought struck him: what if she wasn’t there tomorrow?
What if this very night, she decided to move on, to drive farther away, to disappear where no tracking device could find her?
The thought sent a surge of panic through his veins.
No. He wouldn’t risk losing her again, not when he was this close.
He couldn’t bear another night knowing where she was and doing nothing about it.
Another night where his daughters cried themselves to sleep, another night where Sunny believed herself unwanted.
“I’m going now,” he said, with a conviction that surprised even him. Some moments couldn’t wait for morning light. Some wounds shouldn’t be left to bleed through another night.
Beth was already moving, gathering car keys, a jacket.
Liam knelt, looking his daughters directly in the eyes. “I’m going to find Sunny,” he promised. “And I’m going to do everything I can to bring her home.”
“What if she doesn’t want to come back?” Maddie asked, the pragmatic one, always preparing for the worst to shield her fragile heart.
“Then we’ll respect her decision,” Liam said honestly. “But first, I’m going to make absolutely sure she knows exactly how much she means to all of us.”
Hailey threw her arms around his neck, squeezing with surprising strength. “Tell Sunny we miss her. And tell her I’m sorry I took Betty Bear without asking,” she added to Maddie.
Maddie shook her head. “It’s okay,” she said, joining the hug. “Betty Bear is helping Sunny. That’s more important.”
As Liam stood to leave, a strange calm settled over him. For days, he had been searching blindly, following ghosts and memories, hoping against hope. Now, finally, he had a destination, a fixed point toward which to direct all his determination.
Lake Willow. Two hours away. The place where Sunny — and all their futures — waited.