Certainly the clues were all around me. The pieces of the puzzle that is my older child were all there. I had only to arrange them in their correct positions. Or would there always have been one or two pieces missing? And would finding them have done any good? When Sara went out that night, supposedly to rehearse for an upcoming fashion show at school, I had no idea she was lying. Or maybe I did. Past experience had taught me to view everything Sara said as suspect. But, like a wife who has chosen to stay with her faithless husband, I had made a conscious decision to believe the things she told me until presented with conclusive evidence to the contrary. Sara being Sara, this usually didn’t take long. The first time I’d caught Sara in an outright lie was soon after she turned fifteen. We’d been out for dinner, it was raining, and Sara dropped her purse in the parking lot as we raced for the car. About ten empty packages of cigarettes tumbled out of the overstuffed leather bag and onto the wet pavement.
