You can do this, Caroline encouraged her silently. All you have to do is try. I can help you, if you’ll let me.
She’d resumed teaching twelve years ago, following her divorce. It had taken two years after Samantha’s disappearance for her marriage to finally limp across the finish line and another year after that to find a school principal brave enough to hire her. Unfortunately, the principal hadn’t proved brave enough to keep her on, asking her to resign two years later, following the suicide of one of her students. Not that he blamed her, he’d explained repeatedly. He knew the boy’s death wasn’t her fault. But if word were to get out that a student in one of her classes had killed himself…if parents were to find out…if reporters were to get wind of it…with her history…
Not to worry, she’d told him, leaving without protest.
The following year she’d been hired to teach math at a high school in Golden Hill. She was asked to leave five years later, when the story of the boy’s suicide did indeed make the news. Two years later, she’d found a position at Jarvis Collegiate, a medium-sized, under-achieving high school located in East San Diego, and she’d been teaching there ever since, although with all the recent publicity, with every sordid detail of her life having been dredged up yet again, she didn’t know how long it would be before she was once again asked to quietly resign.
Could she survive another devastating blow? Teaching was the one thing keeping her sane, the one area of her life where she felt any real satisfaction. And she was good at it. No—better than good. She had a genuine gift, a way of reaching even the most recalcitrant of pupils.
Not all of them, she reminded herself.
“You have to know how much carpet you need, right?” Caroline continued, breaking free of such disquieting thoughts. “So the first thing you have to figure out is the total area of the room.” She wrote on the chalkboard behind her:
Area = length × width
= 20 × 10
= 200 square feet
Underneath that she wrote,
Cost = $14.95/sq. foot
“So, the total cost would be the area in square feet multiplied by the cost per square foot. Are you with me?”
Again, no response, no raised hand.
She pointed to the equation on the board. “Twenty times ten equals two hundred. Two hundred multiplied by fourteen ninety-five is…?”
“Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety dollars,” Rob Kearny shouted.
“Correct. Very good, Rob.”
The boy proudly held his smartphone above his head.
“You’re not supposed to have those turned on in class,” Caroline reminded him, her elation short-lived.
“How else are you supposed to figure out the answer?”
“You might try using your head.”
“Give head for Christmas,” Joey Prescott exclaimed, and the rest of the class laughed uproariously.
Caroline suppressed a smile. “All right, class. Settle down. Is any of this making any sense at all? Does anybody have any questions?”
Addison Snider raised her hand.
“Addison?”
“Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?”
The room suddenly stilled, waiting for Caroline’s response.
“It was very nice. Thank you. But I was referring to the lesson.”
Caroline sensed movement from the far side of the room, saw Vicki Garner dropping something onto the desk of the girl behind her. “What’s that? What did Vicki just hand you, Stephanie?”
“Nothing,” Stephanie said, although her thin face said otherwise.
“Can I see it, please?”
Stephanie looked to the floor as she rose from her seat, extending the newspaper clipping in her hand toward Caroline.
Caroline knew even before she saw her daughter’s sweet face staring up at her what she was holding. She set the article on her desk. She’d been expecting something like this. “Okay. You’ve seen the news and you obviously have a lot of questions, so let’s get to them. What do you want to know?”
Silence. Clearly the class was as surprised by her direct question as she was for having asked it.
“Do you think you’ll ever find your daughter?” Vicki asked quietly.
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
I think my real name is Samantha.
Daphne’s hand shot into the air. “What do you think happened to her?”
“I think someone took her.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think she’s still alive?”
I think I’m your daughter.
“I don’t know. I hope so,” she repeated.
“What about that boy?” Joey asked from the back of the room. “The one who killed himself.”
“What about him?”
“Did he really kill himself because of you?”
A wave of low murmurs rippled through the class. “Shut up, Joey,” someone said.
Caroline struggled to stay calm, to keep her voice level. “No, it’s not true.”