48

Days go by.

We continue to search.

We continue to investigate.

I go through everything over and over again, frantically searching for what I missed.

I run through every scenario I can come up with, search every possible location I can conceive of.

But ultimately nothing we try does any good.

Taylor is gone.

I failed to protect her.

I’m failing to find her.

The only feeling that comes anywhere close to the devastating pain and emptiness I feel is the overwhelming and near debilitating guilt.

This is my fault. I am responsible. I put Taylor in this situation. I didn’t keep her safe. And now I am unable to find her, unable to figure out who took her and how, unable to get her and return her safely home.

I now know what so many people I’ve worked with over the years have known—just how excruciating the pain is, just how huge a hole it leaves in your soul, just how relentless the torment of not knowing is.

I feel absolutely numb and in acute agony all the time.

I am frustrated and agitated, irritable and overly sensitive, in many ways a stranger to myself.

All my experience as an investigator, all my study and research, all my decades of practice going back to adolescence—everything I have used over and over for others in crisis I am unable to use for my child, my wife, myself.

Physician heal thyself. He saved others, himself he cannot save.

I feel like a fraud.

I feel like a failure.

I’m experiencing feelings of impotency and uselessness that I could never have even imagined before now.

And yet I don’t care how I feel. I’d gladly live in this total torment for the rest of my life if we could just get Taylor back.

It’s all I care about. It’s all that matters. It’s everything—and the one thing I am unable to do anything about.