My daughter Jessica was nineteen years old when she disappeared on a Friday night in September, four months after giving birth to a daughter she had named Lily and was raising alone in my house in Columbus, Ohio while she figured out how to be a mother and a nineteen-year-old simultaneously.

I want to tell you something about Jessica before I tell you what happened, because the story of her disappearance has a way of reducing her to the fact of it and she was more than that fact.

She was funny — not performed funny, genuinely funny, with a timing that had been there since she was eight years old and that had only gotten better as she got older. She was stubborn in the way that I recognized because I was the same way — the kind of stubbornness that is exhausting in a teenager and becomes an asset in an adult when it has somewhere useful to go. She had been figuring out where it had somewhere useful to go when she got pregnant at eighteen and had made the decision, with the specific clarity of someone who had thought carefully rather than reacted, to keep the baby and to do it well.

She was doing it well.

Not without difficulty — she was tired in the way of new mothers, and she was still in many respects a young woman who had not finished becoming herself, and there were moments of frustration and doubt that I saw and did not comment on because they were normal and because she was handling them. But she loved Lily with the comprehensive devotion of a new parent and she was learning, every day, what that required of her.

She went to her friend Amber’s apartment on a Friday evening in September.

She had asked me to watch Lily for the night — she needed a few hours away, which was reasonable and normal and which I was glad to provide because she needed it.

She kissed Lily before she left.

She told me she’d be home by midnight.

At one in the morning she had not come home and was not answering her phone.

I called Amber.

Amber said Jessica had left at eleven-fifteen, saying she was going home. She had seemed fine. Normal. Nothing unusual about the evening.

I called the police at two in the morning.

Her car was found at six — parked on a street two blocks from Amber’s apartment, locked, with Jessica’s purse on the passenger seat, her phone in the cupholder.

Jessica was not there.

I was forty-seven years old.

I had a four-month-old granddaughter in a crib in the room that had been Jessica’s childhood bedroom and a daughter who was gone and no explanation for either fact.

What followed was the investigation — thorough, careful, ultimately inconclusive in the way that investigations of missing young women are sometimes inconclusive when there is no body, no crime scene, no witness who saw something definitive. Amber was interviewed extensively. The boy who was Lily’s father was interviewed. Every person in Jessica’s life was interviewed.

Nothing.

The case remained open. It was not solved. I was told to call if I had new information.

I had no new information.

I raised Lily.

I raised her in the house where Jessica had grown up, in the room that had been Jessica’s, with the photographs of Jessica on the walls because I believed Lily deserved to know her mother’s face and because I believed — I have always believed, through eight years of no evidence either way — that Jessica was alive somewhere and that Lily might need to recognize her someday.

I told Lily everything I knew about her mother.

The funny things, the real things, the specific details that make a person present in the minds of people who love them. I told her about Jessica’s timing, about her stubbornness, about the way she had kissed Lily before she left on a Friday night as if she knew the moment mattered.

Lily listened to all of it and filed it away in the careful way of children who understand that they are building something from pieces.

Last Tuesday Lily came into the kitchen at four in the afternoon with her tablet.

She was eight years old — the specific eight of a child who has been surrounded by adults who take her seriously and has responded by becoming a person who takes things seriously.

She turned the screen toward me.

She had been watching YouTube — the specific rabbit-hole navigation of a child following recommendations from one video to another. She had started with a video about horses, which was her current obsession, and had somehow arrived at a video that was part of a series produced by a small regional news station in Portland, Oregon.

The series was about people who had rebuilt their lives after difficult circumstances. Ordinary people, short segments, the kind of human interest content that regional stations produce on slow news days.

The woman in the video that Lily had found was speaking directly to the camera about starting over — about leaving a life that had become dangerous and finding a new one in a new city.

The woman was thirty-one years old, with short hair — dyed, a color that was not her natural color — and glasses.

She did not look like Jessica.

But she moved like Jessica. The timing, the specific rhythm of her hands when she spoke, the way she paused before saying something she had considered carefully.

“Grandma,” Lily said. “I think that’s Mommy.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

Then I picked up my phone.

My hands were shaking badly enough that I had to try the number twice.

The detective who had handled Jessica’s case — a woman named Sandra Reyes who had been on the missing persons unit for twelve years and who had given me her card and meant it — answered on the second ring.

I told her about the video.

I told her what Lily had said.

I told her about the way the woman moved.

There was a silence on the line.

“Send me the link,” she said. “Right now.”

What happened in the seventy-two hours following that phone call is something I am not going to describe in detail here because it is not finished and because some things need to reach their ending before they can be told as a complete story.

What I will tell you is that Lily sat beside me on the kitchen counter while I made the call — she had pulled herself up to sit on the counter the way she always did when she wanted to be close — and after I hung up she looked at me with the serious eyes of an eight-year-old who has been building a person from photographs and stories for her entire life and said: “Do you think it’s her?”

I looked at my granddaughter — Jessica’s daughter, the person Jessica had kissed before she left on a Friday night — and I said the most honest thing I could.

“I think we’re going to find out,” I said.

She nodded once.

Then she leaned against me.

We sat in the kitchen of the house where three generations of people had grown up and I held my granddaughter and waited for the phone to ring.