If a girl, I wondered, a fourteen-year-old girl, had shown up in my waiting room wanting an emergency appointment, what would I have done?

Mallory had probably told Hannah it was “important,” or something similar. I didn’t know a therapist, myself included, who wouldn’t have listened to what she had to say. Why? “Important” could have meant she wanted to report abuse. And if a kid wants to report abuse, it’s the responsibility of adults, especially mental health professionals, to bend over backward to listen.

I also wondered whether Hannah had made the connection between the teenager in her office and the little girl she might have seen in her waiting room ten years or so before. Had Mallory said anything to remind her?

Remember me? I’m Mallory.

I tried to put myself in the same circumstances. Would I remember a kid so many years later? Would I even recognize that it was the same kid?

I didn’t think I would. Miller is a common name. Sometimes my friends’ kids changed so much in only a couple of years that I hardly recognized them. Adrienne’s son Jonas had grown so much in the past year that he looked like a completely different child. Sam’s son Simon had gone from little boy to man-child, it seemed, in weeks.

Even if Hannah had remembered the small child she had befriended in the waiting room, the memory wouldn’t have given her many clues. Hannah would have no reason to know anything about the details of Mary Black’s care of Rachel Miller.

But why was Mallory so vague about her concerns about her father?

That was my most troubling question: Why would a girl insist on a session with a therapist and then be vague about what was happening at home?

I made some assumptions about the session that I thought were safe.

Hannah would have asked Mallory directly about drug use, specifically about alcohol. Hannah hadn’t told Diane about any concerns with substance abuse, so apparently she felt satisfied with whatever answer she’d received from Mallory.

Given that Mallory had revealed her mother’s history of mental illness, I suspected that Hannah had directly or indirectly done some version of a mental status exam during the interview to see if what afflicted mother might also be afflicting her progeny. Had Mallory passed?

I didn’t know that. Probably. But there were plenty of unknowns.

I listened for a moment to the sharp cracks and gentle taps that punctuated Lauren’s pool playing. Returning my attention to the bike, I reminded myself that I was doing a lot of speculating.

Mallory had said her father was “up to something.”

But what had he been up to?

Was it related to Mallory’s anxiety about the holidays?

And why had Mallory chosen that day to sit in the waiting room to see Hannah? A great question.

I didn’t have a great answer, or even a good one.

Coloradans don’t tolerate gray skies with any equanimity.

Other weather we endure. Gray skies, no.

On the high desert landscape where the Great Plains rise into the Front Range of the Rockies, we live through the often relentless heat of June and July with little complaint, reassuring each other that even though it’s 103 degrees outside, at least it’s a dry heat.

Our once-a-decade oh-my-God blizzards, or our annual winter cold snaps of day-after-day temperatures below zero and wind chills that feel arctic? Most of us write them off as the price of living in close proximity to the best skiing on the planet.

The hundred-mile-an-hour winter Chinooks blowing out of the mountains in January and February? Hey, lean into it, it’s only a little wind.

Golf-ball-size hail? Fierce summer thunderstorms? We live in a desert. We need the moisture.

But the absence of sunshine?

After two consecutive overcast days the grumbling begins, everyone’s temper shortens, traffic cops stop giving warnings, and people aren’t quite as nice to their dogs. Add a third or, God forbid, a fourth day of concrete-colored skies, and most of the state’s residents, especially the natives, begin to wonder for what it is they’re being punished. A few furtively check their IDs to see if they’ve been magically relocated to Seattle or Cleveland or Buffalo or some other sunshine-deprived location as penance for an obviously serious transgression against humanity.

It’s not that it’s always sunny here. But I have to admit that it feels like it’s always sunny here. The tourist board throws around statistics: We have 300-plus days of sunshine each year, we’re sunnier than San Diego, much sunnier than Miami. I don’t know if any of it’s true. But I do know that the reality is that in Colorado I awaken every morning expecting to see the sun for a healthy chunk of the day.

One day of gray is disappointing. Two days in a row becomes a mini-crisis.

Anything more is cause for alarm.

Once the sun had set on Diane and me as we walked the Mall sharing our secrets about the Miller family, the rest of that week between Christmas and New Year’s-the week after Mallory disappeared-was meteorologically bleak. Thursday brought constant flurries under steely skies. Friday taunted-the sun’s silhouette was occasionally visible behind quickly passing clouds, but warming rays never reached the ground in a way that left behind even a hint of a shadow. Saturday, snow flurries fell intermittently all day long, icy winds howled from Wyoming, and by nightfall downy drifts began to cushion the bases of fences and the low sections of walls that dared to face north.

The sun had disappeared from our state-probably forever-it seemed.

A googol of reporters was camped out in Boulder, still expecting-or, God forbid, hoping for-a garroted body to emerge from a Boulder basement.

But Mallory Miller stayed stubbornly missing.

I was getting dragged into the riddle of her absence further and further.

Everybody was cranky.

Everybody, that is, except Sam Purdy.

And Sam probably should have been cranky. He had been for all of the many years we’d been friends. A lot was going on in his life. He was on the cusp of completing his first holiday season as an unmarried man. He had just celebrated the anniversary of surviving for a year after a heart attack-he’d reminded me that it beat the alternative, hands-down-and he had just managed to complete twelve-plus months without developing a fresh gallstone.

He was still learning the ropes of single-parenting his son, Simon.

And because of Mallory Miller, he was being forced to work overtime on a high-profile holiday crime, not exactly his thing, as part of a team of many detectives, most definitely not his thing.

But Sam’s mood was good. Boulder’s streak of gray days was nothing compared to the winter stretches he’d endured in his family home on Minnesota’s Iron Range. His health problems? He had grown philosophical about them, felt he was doing all he could-with diet and exercise-to manage them. His divorce? Despite some stumbles he thought that he and Sherry had handled it all like grown-ups. Was there enough money to go around? Of course not-as Sam had indelicately put it, “I live in fucking Boulder. How could there be enough money?” Sam’s son Simon? He was a good kid. He had some emotional bruises from what his parents’ marital disruption had forced him to endure, but Sam was confident that his son would do okay.

I didn’t disagree.

The Mallory Miller case? Right from the start, Sam had pitched his tent in the don’t-get-too-worked-up-about-this, she’s-a-runaway camp. But he was a professional cop, and until his captain told him otherwise he planned to continue to investigate the details of her disappearance as though she might have been kidnapped by some mysterious intruder.