Free The Good Girl by Mary Kubica

snow and onto the sidewalk, where she strolls by the homes of Mr. and Mrs. Pewter and the Donaldson family. While one of the cars crawls along behind her, the other sends an officer to get me, and I come running out the door with bare feet to snatch up my wandering daughter. “Mia, honey, where are you going?” I’ve heard myself ask countless times, gathering her by the shirtsleeves and reeling her in. She never wears a coat and her hands are ice-cold. She never knows where she’s going but she always follows me home and I thank the officers as we pass by, on our way into the kitchen for a cup of warm milk. She shivers as she drinks it and when she’s through she says she’s going to bed. She’s felt unwell for the past week, always longing to be in bed.
    But today for some reason she sees the police cars. I pull out of the garage and onto the street, en route to Dr. Rhodes’s office for Mia’s first round of hypnosis. It’s a moment of lucidity that passes by as she gazes out the window and asks, “What are they doing here?” as if they had arrived right then and there in that single lucid moment.
    “Keeping us safe,” I say diplomatically. What I mean to say is keeping you safe, but I don’t want her to fear the reasons she’s not.
    “From what?” she asks, turning her head to watch the policemen through the back window. One starts his car and follows us down the road. The other lingers behind to keep an eye on the house while we’re gone.
    “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I respond in lieu of an answer to her question, and she gratefully accepts it, turning around to watch out the front window and forgetting altogether that we’re being trailed.
    We drive down the neighborhood street. It’s quiet. The kids have returned to school after two weeks of winter break and no longer loiter in their front lawns building snowmen and tossing snowballs at one another with high, shrieking laughter, sounds that are foreign in our uncommunicative home. Christmas lights remain on homes, those inflatable Santas unplugged and lying dead in mounds of snow. James didn’t take the time to decorate the exterior of the house this year, though I went all out on the inside just in case. Just in case Mia came home and there was cause to celebrate.
    She’s agreed to hypnosis. It didn’t take much coaxing. These days Mia agrees to most everything. James is against the idea; he thinks hypnosis is a bogus science, equivalent to reading palms and astrology. I don’t know what I believe, though I’ll be damned if I don’t give it a try. If it helps Mia remember one split second of those missing months, it’s worth the exorbitant cost and the time spent in the waiting room of Dr. Avery Rhodes.
    What I understood of hypnosis a week ago was negligible. After awakening at night to research hypnosis on the internet, I became enlightened. Hypnosis, as I’ve come to understand it, is a very relaxed trancelike state similar to daydreaming. This will allow Mia to become less inhibited and tune out the rest of the world to allow herself, with the doctor’s help, to arouse the memories she’s lost. Under hypnosis, the subject becomes highly suggestible, and can recall information that the mind has locked in a vault. By hypnotizing Mia, Dr. Rhodes will be dealing directly with the subconscious, that part of the brain that’s hidden Mia’s memories from her. The goal is to put Mia into a state of deep relaxation so her conscious mind, more or less, goes to sleep and Dr. Rhodes can deal with the subconscious. For Mia’s sake, the goal is to regain all or some part—some minute details even—of her time in the cabin so that, through therapy, she can come to terms with her abduction and heal. For the investigation’s sake, however, Detective Hoffman is desperate for information, for any details or clues that Colin Thatcher might have aired in the cabin that would help police find the man who did this to Mia.
    When we arrive