Chapter 1

I was eating cake when Derek suddenly put down his fork and looked at me.

"Who's Mike Hansen?"

My fork stopped halfway to my mouth.

My heart slammed against my ribs.

Mike Hansen.

That name was a code I'd made up with Sarah Mitchell one night in college, after way too many beers. We promised each other, if one of us ever went missing, if something was wrong, that name would be the signal.

No one else in the world knew.

And Sarah had been missing for thirty-two days.

She said she was going to Sedona to clear her head.

She never came back.

I looked at Derek's calm face, and my blood ran cold.

How did he know that name?

Mike Hansen was a name Sarah and I invented our senior year of college, sitting on the roof of our dorm with two cans of cheap beer.

The stars were thick that night.

Sarah threw her arm around my shoulders, half-drunk, and said, "Claire, we need a code word."

"A code word for what?"

"For if something happens to one of us. If one of us disappears. You hear that name, you know something's wrong."

I told her she was being dramatic.

But I helped her come up with it anyway. We settled on Mike Hansen because it was so painfully common. No one would ever suspect it.

Only two people in the world knew what those words meant.

Me.

And Sarah.

And Sarah had been missing for thirty-two days.

She said she was going to Sedona for a few days. Before she left, she sent me a voice message, her voice so excited: "Claire! What should I send you?"

That was the last time I heard her voice.

After that, her texts went unanswered.

Her phone went straight to voicemail.

Her Instagram stopped at a photo of Cathedral Rock.

I filed a report.

Her family filed a report.

The police in Arizona were looking.

But no body. No trace.

Sarah had vanished like she never existed.

And now.

My husband Derek. A man who didn't even have Sarah on social media. A man who'd only met her a handful of times. A man who nodded at her at parties and then walked away.

He had just asked me, while eating cake, who Mike Hansen was.

"You okay?" Derek raised an eyebrow. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I'm fine." I shoved a bite of cake into my mouth. Tasted like nothing. "Never heard that name. Where'd you see it?"

"Oh, scrolling online." He took a sip of his coffee. "Just curious."

He changed the subject. Started talking about his golf game this weekend.

I didn't hear a single word.

My brain was stuck on one question.

How did he know?