"Oh my god," she said.
In the lavender room, Inez's hand was already in her cardigan pocket. The phone in its dark brown case had buzzed three times in five minutes, and she had ignored it three times, and now her body overruled her and pulled it out the way you pull at a scab.
The lock screen was a photograph of sky: a flat, perfect New Mexico blue that Luz had taken from the roof two summers ago, when Abuelo had climbed up to fix the swamp cooler and Luz had climbed up after him and they had both been yelled at. Across the blue, one over another, the notifications stacked.
Briarwood House — Missed call (3)
Briarwood House: Inez, this is Dawn. Your dad left the building after lunch, we think through the garden gate. Staff are searching the grounds and APD has been notified. Please call us as soon as you see this.
Inez read it once. Her stern face, the one she had been wearing like a borrowed coat for six weeks, simply came apart. It did not crumple. It dropped, all at once, as if the strings holding it up had been cut. She closed her eyes. She stood there in her daughter's lavender room with a sandwich bag of thumbtacks in one hand and the phone in the other, and for one second she was not a woman behind schedule. She was a woman who had known, for a long time, that this exact moment was coming, and had kept packing anyway.
Downstairs, a key turned in a lock.
The front door unlatched. It had always stuck in the fall, when the wood swelled, and her father had always said he'd plane it and never had. It creaked open, slow and long, the sound Inez had heard ten thousand times in her life, the sound of someone coming home.
She turned toward it. Every muscle in her back went tight.
From the bottom of the stairs, a voice called up into the empty house, cheerful and puzzled.
"Pilar? Why is the furniture outside?"
Luz heard the voice and the boxes left her arms.