There is a specific quality to the grief of not knowing.

It is different from the grief of loss.

Loss has an end to it, a bottom, a place where the falling stops and you begin the long process of learning to stand in a world that contains the absence. Loss is devastating and permanent and real, and the people who go through it will tell you that the permanence itself is, eventually, something you can orient yourself around. You know where the edges of the hole are. You learn to live with the shape of it.

Not knowing has no edges.

Not knowing is a hole with no bottom, and you fall into it every morning when you wake up and every night when you try to sleep, and the falling never ends because there is always the possibility that today will be the day something changes, always the chance that the phone will ring or the door will open or a face will appear somewhere in the world that answers the question you have been asking for years.

Not knowing keeps you alive in a way that sometimes feels like dying.

My daughter Nora was sixteen years old when she disappeared from a beach in Florida on the fourteenth of July, eight years ago.

She was wearing a turquoise cover-up my mother had made her.

She was going to get ice cream.

I watched her walk away through the crowd.

I thought about how tall she had gotten over the winter.

I never saw her again.

My name is Claire Vargas.

I am forty-seven years old.

I live in a house in Asheville, North Carolina, with my husband Michael, who has been beside me for every one of the eight years since Nora disappeared, and who has never stopped trying to reach me in the places I go when the grief becomes something I cannot share.

He is a patient man.

He is the most patient man I have ever known.

I tested this patience in the years after Nora went missing in ways that I am not proud of, and ways that I understand in retrospect as the behavior of a person who is operating far beyond the limits of what a person should have to endure.

I stopped sleeping regularly in the first year.

I stopped eating regularly in the second.

I quit my job, which was a position I had held for eleven years as an administrator at a community college, because I could not be present enough for the work and because I could not stop checking my phone every four minutes in case someone had called.

I spent the third and fourth years doing almost nothing except searching.

I had volunteers who helped me maintain social media pages.

I hired a private investigator who spent eight months and a significant portion of our savings finding nothing.

I drove to Florida four times.

I stood on the beach where she disappeared and I looked at the water and the sand and the specific geography of the place where my daughter had been and was no longer, and I tried to understand something I could not understand.

Michael came with me every time.

He drove when I could not drive.

He sat beside me on the sand.

He did not tell me it would be all right.