The first thing I noticed was the color.

Bright blue, catching the morning light, rolling slowly across the patio tiles until it bumped against the toe of my slipper and stopped. I looked down at it without understanding what I was seeing. Then I looked up.

The pool was gone.

Not gone, exactly. The water was still there beneath it all. But the surface had disappeared completely under millions of tiny, shimmering beads in every color I could name and several I couldn’t, blue and green and yellow and red and orange, layered so densely that the pool looked like something between a painting and a dream, still and strangely beautiful in the early morning light.

I stood in the open doorway and forgot to breathe.

Then I saw the shape at the bottom.

Large. Rectangular. Too deliberate and too straight-edged to be debris, too large to have drifted there, too perfectly centered to be anything other than something someone had placed with intention.

I gripped the doorframe.

“Carmelo.”

My husband appeared from the kitchen hallway carrying two mugs of coffee, the same way he appeared every morning of our lives together, unhurried, still in his robe, his hair pressed flat on one side from sleep. He started to say something and then he saw my face.

One mug slipped from his hand and struck the counter. Coffee spread in a dark pool beneath the toaster. Neither of us moved to clean it up.

He stepped past me onto the patio.

The Orbeez shifted softly against the pool tiles, making a faint clicking sound like rainfall against a window. There were millions of them. I couldn’t begin to calculate how many. They moved in slow, lazy circles, and beneath them the rectangular shape rested silently at the bottom, waiting.

Carmelo stood very still.

“Was that there last night?”

“No,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“I covered the pool at nine.”

He turned to look at the pool cover, neatly folded and stacked against the fence. We both stared at it for a moment.

Someone had come into our yard in the night and removed the cover. Carefully, without tearing it, without leaving it in a heap. They had folded it. That detail frightened me more than anything else I was looking at.

This was not a prank.

---

There are things you carry after a child disappears that no one prepares you for.

Not the grief, which people do prepare you for, in the broken, insufficient ways that people try. Not the unanswered questions, which you know will come. What no one tells you about is the specific and relentless weight of the ordinary. The way you still have to go to the grocery store and the pharmacy and the bank. The way the television still works and the mail still arrives and the neighbor’s dog still barks in the mornings as if the world has not fundamentally changed shape.

The way the pool still has to be covered each night at nine, because that is what you do, and doing it is the only structure you have left.

Mason had been gone for three years.

He disappeared on a Saturday afternoon in July, at the town’s summer festival, in a park surrounded by hundreds of people, in a moment so brief I still cannot fully account for it. He was holding my hand at the ring toss booth. Someone bumped my shoulder. I turned for less than five seconds.