The late-evening sun is low and soft, its deep red rays like blood on the beach.
Following a particularly difficult day of searching for Taylor and investigating what happened to her, I’m standing barefooted before the gentle green tide of the Gulf in nearly the exact spot Taylor and I had the day we first arrived at Sandcastle for my lecture series and our vacation.
It has been two weeks since Taylor was taken, and I’m no closer to finding her now than when she first vanished.
On either side of me the beach is mostly empty—only the occasional lone sun-tinged figure in the distance—as is much of the town of Sandcastle behind me.
I think about what a solitary sun-tinged figure I am.
Over the course of a lifetime of loneliness, I’ve never felt more isolated, more utterly and completely alone.
I tried bringing Johanna here on one of our recent days together—my fear and paranoia wouldn’t let me take her into town—but like most of the times I’m with her these days, I couldn’t stop crying and holding and hugging her.
I am haunted by Anna’s final words to me, that I am ultimately responsible for Taylor’s abduction, that not preventing it when Anna was essentially incapacitated rests squarely on my bent shoulders.
I am even more haunted by how every cell that makes up me is in complete agreement with her.
I am tormented every second of every day—both waking and sleeping—wondering and worrying about where Taylor is and what horrific experiences she could be going through.
The acute affliction of my anguish is incessant, and I feel as though I’m losing the moorings of my mind.
The insidiousness of this particular torture is that the very thing I need to find her—my mind—is under continuous assault.
Despite all this, I will not stop, cannot stop my search, my relentless pursuit of her.
The only respite of any kind at all that I get these days is coming here—to this place where she and I had kicked off our shoes and enjoyed the morning sun-warmed sand together.
I feel her here, her sweet, kind, carefree presence, and I am buoyed up by it—at least to the extent that I can be.
At a time when I have little to hold on to, little to be thankful for, I’m so, so glad I brought her here when she asked me to, when I was only minutes away from giving my first talk and could have used those same minutes in final preparations.
We shared a moment here that, though everything else has been taken from me, remains fixed and firm in my wounded heart and embattled mind.
And as the last of the setting sun sinks into the green-gold Gulf, I say to her what I always say to her before leaving this now sacred spot.
“I will find you,” I whisper. “I swear it.”