Every Friday at 6 p.m. my daughter called me without fail, and the one week my phone stayed silent I drove to her house and heard a sound from upstairs that turned our quiet Tennessee life into something I still can’t fully talk about

She stayed at cheap motels, never more than two nights in the same place. She used prepaid credit cards that were hard to trace. Somewhere along the way she dyed her hair from blonde to dark brown and started wearing glasses.

“She’s careful,” Carter told me during one call. “Or scared enough to try to be careful. But everyone makes mistakes eventually.continue reading …