I don’t act on it right away.

  I carry the unease through Thursday and Friday and the weekend and I tell myself it’s just grief in some complicated form. That Sebastian’s death stirred something that will settle if I give it time.

  It doesn’t settle.

  Dylan doesn’t push. He checks on me the way he does, quietly, a hand on my shoulder, tea left on my desk. He knows something is turning over. He doesn’t ask until Sunday night when I’m still sitting at the kitchen table at ten o’clock staring at nothing.

  “Talk to me,” he says.

  “I keep thinking about Elise.”

  He sits down.

  “I told myself she was fine,” I say. “For years I just. I made a decision and I told myself she was fine and I didn’t look.” I look at my hands. “Sebastian is gone and she’s out there somewhere and I don’t know anything about her life. I haven’t let myself know anything.”

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  “What do you want to do?”

  I think about the sealed room. All the years of walking past it.

  “I need to find her,” I say.

  That night I open my laptop. I search her name. Elise Hendrick. I go slowly, pausing between results, not sure what I’m hoping to find and not sure what I’m afraid of.

  Not much comes back. A university enrollment that’s a few years old. A blurry profile picture that might be her. Nothing with a city. Nothing current.

  She would be twenty-one now.

  I search for Sebastian next. His obituary comes back easily enough, brief and factual. A man whose name once carried weight in certain circles but whose death barely made a ripple. The estate had been quiet for years. The caretaker listed as the sole recipient of what little remained. No mention of Elise. Just a man who died leaving very little behind.

  But the obituary lists a neighborhood. The one he lived in for thirty years.

  That’s where she would have grown up, I think. That’s where I start.

  I write it down.

  Okay. Start there.