The Girl from Widow Hills - Megan Miranda Page 0,89

sure if this handful of hours of fitful sleep counted as rested, but at least I had calmed. I sat on the bed, opening my laptop, checking in to my work email remotely.

I knew it wasn’t difficult to figure out my email address. The public email accounts for the hospital all had the same format. First name, last name, followed by our hospital domain. But I still cringed to see my inbox full of messages from addresses I knew and didn’t know alike.

Despite myself, I read them all, to arm myself for what was to come.

That initial article must’ve been picked up for wider distribution through the night. Journalists requesting interviews and quotes, people coming out of the woodwork in a very different way this time.

I paused at the email from the girl in high school. I remembered. Well, I remembered she was the reason I got sent home from school, mandatory meetings with the therapist—twisting the story to turn herself into a victim instead of the instigator.

Victim, endurance, triumph.

Shuffle the roles, craft your own story.

Or maybe that was just what she chose to remember after all this time—that she’d once been thrown into a locker room wall. Not that she had baited me, taunting me, blocking my exit from the locker room.

The cinder-block walls and the rows of lockers, no windows, no doors. Just that thick humidity and one way out, and a cold sweat breaking out, my skin rising in goose bumps—in warning. My vision turning hazy until I remembered I wasn’t a six-year-old girl stuck underground anymore, waiting to be saved. I needed to get out in a way that took over everything, body and mind alike. The need for an exit superseding all else, including the person blocking my way.

I hit “delete” on message after message, until I reached the note from a name I hadn’t seen in a long time: Emma Lyons.

She’d been a local reporter covering the search and rescue when her timely interview with my mother had elevated her to part of the national story. It had made her career. I checked the photos on my phone of the interview transcripts Nathan had in that file: Emma had been with my mother when the news broke; Emma Lyons had been on scene as I was rescued; she had landed the single interview with Sean Coleman afterward.

Then she’d been everywhere.

The footage was linked to in every online story that followed. I watched those videos myself now, from the hotel bed:

That woman in the blue dress, walking through the brush. Crossing some barrier in that moment, poised and wild at the same time. Her heels sinking into the mud. A streak of dirt across her arm.

Afterward, Emma Lyons went on to give interviews herself, an expert on those three harrowing days. There was a soothing tone to her voice, a Southern lilt—something she never tried to hide.

There were other reporters, of course. Different programs, different stations. But she’d been the one to deliver the news to my mother; it had granted her an elevated role. She became the media face of the story—a thing played back as much as the rescue itself.

I responded to her now, thinking it was too early to call. I do need your help. Did you ever hear about Sean Coleman’s son? I left my cell number at the bottom of the email, then returned to watching the other videos.

Her interview with Sean Coleman was so brief—he looked so young, so unsure. A deer caught in the headlights, with no idea how he’d found himself there. My heart sank, watching him then, so alive. No one asked about his life. There was no indication that there’d been a nine-year-old and wife at home.

Then I clicked over to the famous clip—the one where Emma was interviewing my mother just as the news came through. I knew the words by heart, but this time, I focused on my mother’s face. Knowing, with finality, that I would never see it again.

The image was so pixelated, a video from twenty years earlier. Her hands fidgeted as she spoke, and she gripped the handles of a tan tote bag slung over her shoulder. Her body turned slightly to the left, and I froze the frame. Rewound it, watched again.

That tote—it had been part of a fund-raising effort by the volunteer center. My school photo, with the generic blue background. The words Have You Seen Me? printed below, along with the tip number. She was holding it