When an Instagram-famous teenager mysteriously disappears, her mother grapples with the revelation of dark secrets in this twisty, atmospheric thriller—from the author of Everything We Didn’t Say.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Nicole Baart’s The Long Way Back, which is out now.
Mother and daughter Charlie and Eva never sought social media fame, but when a stunning photo of Eva went viral, fame found them. Now, after more than two years documenting life on the road in their vintage Airstream trailer, the duo has temporarily settled in a tiny Minnesota town. Eva is happily finishing her senior year of high school and applying to college, but Charlie longs for the adventures they left behind.
When Eva goes missing less than a week before her graduation, it’s Charlie who is immediately suspected of foul play—not just by their fans, but also by the police and the FBI. As a fight about one more road trip comes to light, and the truth about their relationship is questioned, Charlie realizes the rosy facade they portrayed online hid a complicated and potentially dangerous reality. Now, to clear her name and find out what has happened to her daughter, she’ll have to confront her own role in Eva’s disappearance—and whether she knew her daughter at all.
PART ONE
Charlie
INSTAGRAM POST #1
I must be a mermaid,
I have no fear
of depths and
a great fear
of shallow living.
Anaïs Nin
[IMAGE CONTENTS: A raven-haired girl beneath a waterfall.]
It was a hollow caption, as empty and desolate as the husk of a seed. The photo had to be experienced, and Charlie felt sorry for anyone who couldn’t see Eva with the water cascading down her face and across her narrow shoulders. She was thirteen, sleek and plump, with a pointed nose, pointed chin, and two perfectly pointed ears that hinted at what she would one day be. Not pretty, per se—at least, not yet—but arresting, and made all the more extraordinary by the cold disdain in her sapphire eyes.
Incongruous. That’s what it was. The petal-soft blush of her full cheeks paired with the penetrating wisdom of her gaze. A child caught at the exact intersection between girl and woman.
“Mom,” Eva said, in the moment before Charlie snapped the picture, “don’t.”
But Charlie did. It was a moment of madness, of ferocious love, that disintegrated after the shutter snapped and Eva tumbled off the slippery rock, falling headlong beneath the foamy spray of the waterfall. There was laughter then, and Charlie carefully packed away her camera and dove in to join her daughter. But the moment was resurrected later, when the image lit up Charlie’s computer screen.
Without a doubt, the picture of Eva in the waterfall was the most powerful portrait that Charlie had ever taken. Eva was just turning, framed between a wall of greenish water on one side and slick, brown stone on the other. One slender hand was on the rock, and one hand was tangled in her long hair as she pushed damp curls out of her eyes. Before that, she had been posing. All artificial smiles and a self-conscious thrust to her jaw. But the last click of Charlie’s camera had captured a singular moment, an unexpected window into Eva’s soul. Something wild lived there, raw and untamed, a whole world contained in her eyes.
Charlie couldn’t print it, not something so intimate and vulnerable, but it also seemed cruel not to share. So she cropped it close—one shockingly blue eye, a wet ribbon of hair against the blade of her cheekbone, the sparkle of sunlit water—and showed it to Eva.
“That’s me?” She couldn’t suppress her grin, but tried by pinning her bottom lip between her teeth. “Wow, Mom. I mean, wow. Can we post it?”
Their Sutton Girls Instagram page had been the only thing Eva truly wanted for her thirteenth birthday. Allegedly, all the kids in her class were already on social media (age limits be damned), and Eva felt the pinch of isolation when they chatted over chicken nuggets in the school cafeteria about accounts they followed, funny memes they saw, and photo ops they were staging. It was obvious Eva thought that maybe this was her in. Still, Charlie couldn’t stomach the thought of her daughter online at such a young age, so they had compromised: The Sutton Girls. A joint account to chronicle their life as a little party of two. At first Eva had argued, but it was half-hearted, and in the end the very first photo they posted was the close-cropped waterfall shot. Eva found and carefully typed out the mermaid quote all by herself.
They only had a handful of followers (mostly family and friends), but the photo took on a life of its own. Strangers liked it and commented, put it in their stories and archived it for later. Charlie’s phone pinged incessantly with notifications until Eva showed her how to turn them off.
Somehow the picture garnered a hundred likes within the first day. It quickly blossomed to two hundred. Then, suddenly, a thousand. Friends of friends and members of their Duluth, Minnesota, community and total strangers who double-clicked and then expressed their deep appreciation by sharing to Stories and hitting Follow—hoping for more. By the time ten thousand people had liked their post, and there were more comments than Charlie or Eva could ever hope to keep up with, everything had changed. Even if they didn’t know it yet.
“I think we just went kind of viral,” Charlie said. “They’re calling you the Little Mermaid.”
One side of Eva’s mouth quirked in an abashed smile. “I know.” Then she giggled. “Does that make you Ursula?”
And Charlie started to sing: “You poor, unfortunate soul!”
