“Who’s Dolly?”
I looked up from the pile of laundry on the kitchen table.
“Our new cleaning lady at school,” Sophie said casually.
Something about the way she said it made me pause.
I reached for the sweater again.
It was old—far older than anything a child should have been wearing to school. The wool had faded with time, and the sunflower stitched across the front was slightly uneven.
Then I noticed something inside the collar.
Two faded red initials.
L.M.
My hands began to shake.
I knew those initials.
I had spent almost forty years trying not to think about them.
Laura M.
My sister.
My sister who disappeared when she was sixteen.
In 1986, Laura and I turned sixteen.
Our mother knitted birthday sweaters for both of us.
Mine was decorated with little daisies.
Laura’s had a giant sunflower across the front, including one accidental brown petal that Mom had tried—and failed—to correct.
Laura loved it anyway.
She wore it constantly.
That night, after blowing out the candles, Laura kissed Mom and smiled.
“I’m going outside for some fresh air,” she said. “Save me another slice of cake!”
Then she walked out.
She never came back.
There was no note.
No suitcase.
No phone call.
And most importantly, there was no sunflower sweater.
For years, Mom searched for her.
She contacted everyone she could think of. She kept photographs of Laura everywhere and refused to believe that her daughter was simply gone.
Dad was different.
He stopped searching within months.
Eventually, Laura’s photographs were boxed away.
Her name became something we weren’t supposed to mention.
I used to believe grief had made Dad cold.
But after all those years, I began to wonder whether there had been something else he had never told us.
Then Sophie pointed at the sunflower on the old sweater.
“Dolly said you should check inside.”
I carefully turned the sweater inside out.
There, hidden beneath the large sunflower, was something I had never seen before.
A tiny wooden charm.
A sunflower.
My knees nearly gave way.
Dad used to carve little wooden flowers for Laura and me when we were children.
Laura’s favorite had always been a sunflower.
But there was something even more disturbing.
I had seen that exact little wooden sunflower only once after Laura disappeared.
It was in Dad’s hand.
That night.
The night Laura vanished.
I had never understood why he had been holding it.
I had never asked.
Or perhaps I had been too afraid to ask.
Now the same charm was sewn into Laura’s old sweater.
“How did Dolly get it?” Sophie asked.
I stared at the little wooden flower.
“I don’t know.”
Those three words had controlled my life for forty years.
For forty years, I had lived with questions that had no answers.
But suddenly, one of those answers might be standing inside my daughter’s school.
And I wasn’t prepared to let another day pass.
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