Jon handed her the binoculars.
“There,” he said. “Nearest field. Is that Sarah?”
Margaret adjusted the focus and the image sharpened.
It was Sarah.
Wide-brimmed hat. Work shirt. Kneeling beside a plant with exact, careful attention. Even 15 years later, Margaret recognized the way her eldest daughter bent toward living things when she was interested. As a child, Sarah had spent whole afternoons in the backyard strawberry patch, checking leaves for pests as if the plants themselves were trusting her with secrets.
“She’s checking for pests,” Margaret murmured. “Sarah always did that.”
They watched the 3 young women work the rows with synchronized efficiency. No chatter. No joking. No ease. They moved like people accustomed to labor and to being watched while doing it. Then a man emerged from the house and crossed the yard toward them.
Margaret needed no binoculars to know him.
“That’s him,” she whispered. “That’s Robert Greenfield.”
He still walked with the same deliberate stride, the same quiet authority that had once read as calm to parents and colleagues. But age had changed him. His hair had gone fully white. His posture had tightened. Even from a distance, there was something more rigid in him now, something sharpened by ownership mistaken for devotion.
The 3 young women gathered when he reached the field. He appeared to be giving instructions, pointing toward separate sections of the rows. They listened with lowered heads and occasional nods.
“They’re afraid of him,” Margaret said.
Jon took the binoculars and watched in silence for several minutes.
“What makes you say that?”
“Look at how they stand,” Margaret said. “That’s not how daughters stand with a father they adore. That’s how children stand with someone they don’t want to disappoint.”
Jon lowered the binoculars, thoughtful, unwilling to say more than he could prove.
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe they’re just serious. We have to be careful what we read into this.”
But Margaret knew what she was seeing. The 3 women worked hard, relentlessly, breaking only when Greenfield brought water or moved them to another task. There was no lightness in their motions. No visible freedom. Just competence shaped by obedience.
After nearly an hour, Greenfield returned to the house. The sisters continued working. Then Sophie, or perhaps Stella, lifted her head and looked toward the road, scanning the hills as though searching for someone she half-expected and half-feared to see.
“We need to get closer,” Margaret said.
“That’s exactly what we said we wouldn’t do.”
“Jon, what if they want to leave and don’t know how? What if they’ve been taught there’s nowhere else?”
Before he could answer, Greenfield reappeared on the porch carrying what was unmistakably a rifle. He stood scanning the hills with slow, suspicious intent.
Jon went still.
“He knows someone’s watching,” he said. “We need to go.”
They drove away carefully, trying not to raise dust.
Only when they reached the main road did Margaret begin speaking again.
“We have to do something.”
“We need proof,” Jon said. “Real proof. Not body language and old names and what we think we saw from a hill.”
“And if we’re right?”
He gripped the wheel harder.
“Then we go to the police.”
That night Margaret wandered the house as if she were carrying too much electricity to sit still. In the girls’ old bedroom, which she had never fully changed, she sat on one of the small beds and stared at the walls still lined with childhood photographs. Three identical faces smiled from birthdays, holidays, summer afternoons, the ordinary little celebrations that make up a family before catastrophe teaches them the cost of the ordinary.
Jon found her there an hour later.
“I keep thinking about that last morning,” she said without looking up. “I told them to stay where I could see them. But I was doing dishes. I wasn’t really watching. I let them down.”
“You did not,” Jon said firmly, sitting beside her on the bed. “You were being a normal parent in a safe neighborhood. This isn’t your fault.”
“If I had been more careful—”
“He would have found another opportunity,” Jon said. “If he wanted to take them, he would have found a way.”
Margaret turned toward him then, tears already sliding down her face.
“You really think it’s them, don’t you?”
He nodded slowly.
“I think the evidence is strong enough that we have to act as though it could be.”
“How?”
“We start with DNA,” he said. “Hair. Saliva. Skin cells on something discarded. Something the police can test.”
The next opportunity came on Saturday.
The market opened beneath a low gray sky and a thin coastal mist that made the awnings and produce displays look slightly unreal, like a town staged for a memory rather than a morning. Margaret and Jon arrived early and positioned themselves near a coffee stand with a clean view of the Strawberry Sisters’ booth.
At 8:30, a battered pickup pulled into the lot.
Margaret’s heart kicked hard at the sight of the 3 young women climbing down from the cab. They moved fast, unloading crates and display boards with a smooth efficiency that suggested this ritual had been repeated too many times to require thought. Even from a distance, Margaret noticed something else.
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