Cassandra knew her mother was dead and had for some time. There was no way her mother was alive and hadn't made contact with her family all these years later. She didn't know where she was and she didn't know why but she knew her mother was gone and would never return home.

She'd been just nineteen the day she learned her mother was missing, Alex had been just two. She came home from university to find police taking statements from her father and a neighborhood search party scouring whole blocks for any sign of her mother. Cadaver dogs investigated neighborhood ponds and parks and Cassandra quickly realized how serious her mother's disappearance was. She and her father had waited by the phone for days, hoping Bella would call.

Initially, Cassandra thought her mother might have fallen and hit her head, winding up in the hospital with no memory. She later wondered if her mother had taken a walk in a more rural part of Pleasantview and suffered an accident, needing to be rescued from whatever remote area she was in.

Weeks went by without a call and Cassandra increasingly came closer to believing her worst fears had been realized. But nothing was certain yet and she held out hope her mother would return any day now, tired and dirty, but safe.

In the meantime, Cassandra decided her sophomore year could wait. Truthfully, she knew she couldn't go back, Alex needed her. Her baby brother was still in diapers and had no concept of his mother not being around. And Mortimer was in no state to care for his son, barely even leaving his bed most days.

And so Cassandra did her best to care for him, desperate to protect him in the absence of their parents.

It had been just a few years since Bella had sat Cassandra down in her room and told her she would no longer be an only child sometime next summer. The news surprised her, seeing as she had been an only child for sixteen years. But she was ecstatic to have a baby sibling on the way and counted down the days until June when she would finally get to meet him.

Her mother had confided in her that the baby was a surprise, though not an unpleasant one. Having a baby in her forties was very different from having Cassandra in her mid twenties and Cassandra realized her mother was afraid. She was determined to help her mother through her fear and she attended her doctors appointments just as often as her father did, watching her baby brother develop more and more on the sonogram screen at each visit.

When Alexander was born in late June, Cassandra swore to protect him the moment she saw him swaddled in his hospital bassinet. She was his sister and she would protect him from any harm that might come his way and at the age of seventeen, it never occurred to her there would be things she couldn't protect him from.

Her father had gradually emerged from his bedroom and it was several months into her mother's disappearance that Mortimer began to insist Bella had been abducted by aliens. He first mentioned his theory when Cassandra had Alex on her hip, attempting to find the peas she had puréed earlier that morning in the refrigerator. It was excruciating when he said it, an unintentionally cruel joke when Cassandra knew her mother was most likely in one of Pleasantview's many bodies of water. But her father had always been a dreamer and he was living in clear denial, leading Cassandra to bite her tongue whenever he mentioned UFOS or reasons why her mother might have been taken. Inside, she was seething, needing her father more than anything and having to care for both him and Alex. She needed to be taken care of and it was times like this she missed her mother stroking her hair on the sofa, whispering how much she loved her as Cassandra cuddled up against her.

After getting Alex to bed each night, she went upstairs to shower and rinse off whatever foodstuff Alex had managed to get in her hair. It wasn't until she looked at herself in the mirror six months after her mother's disappearance that she could no longer recognize herself, her jeans covered in Alex's finger paints and her hair greasy from not being washed that week. She was at her breaking point and she begged her father to let her return back to university.

Her professors had allowed her to take a break as long as she needed, allowing her to study in the form of correspondence courses. But she needed to be back in the classroom, needed the comfort of her beakers and scientific journals and to talk to someone about anything else than cartoon characters or alien conspiracy theories.

School proved to be a much needed relief for her and she tried to bury her guilt by working on her dissertation. Her father had understood why she had to go back to school and he had never blamed her but she felt the guilt gnaw at her if she didn't have something to distract her.

She returned home during every break and was always amazed to see how much her brother had grown. Alex had entered kindergarten the year Cassandra had finished college and Mortimer was getting older. He asked Cassandra to move back home again and she agreed, knowing Alexander was more independent now. She took a job in a research position at a pharmaceutical company, spending the next few years putting away long hours in the lab.

It was there she met Don. They worked in the same complex in the medical district and Cassandra would often bump into the young resident on her lunch break. After a few chance encounters, Don asked if she would like to grab lunch together.

It was a whirlwind romance and Cassandra quickly found herself enamored. Don was tall, with piercing blue eyes and a thick head of black hair he wore in a pompadour. Like Cassandra, he was also of Italian ancestry and their first date had been to an Italian restaurant Don insisted served real Italian food. As it turned out, he lived just a few blocks from her house and they would spend whatever free evenings they had watching movies on his flat screen, his arm wrapped around her shoulder as they cuddled on the couch. They could talk for hours about their dreams, their pain, their hopes for the future and it was the first time Cassandra had ever felt that anyone cared about her so deeply. It wasn't shocking that when he proposed six months into dating, she said yes.

She had her doubts and she knew of Don's reputation as a skirt chaser. But every time she brought up her fears, Don reminded her he had chosen her, he had asked her to marry him, and Cassandra tried to put her thoughts at ease. But if she was honest with herself, she couldn't quite shake the feeling there was something she didn't know.

A wedding date was set that spring and as the day drew closer, Cassandra wondered if she was making the right choice.

She still had her reservations about his many female friends, despite his reassurances. But he was great with Alex and there was no doubt in her mind he would be an excellent father. And he had known Bella.

It was a shock to find out Don had known her mother, much more so when she learned Don had seen Bella hours before she went missing. But it was comforting to have someone who knew her, someone who had even helped look for her nearly a decade ago. When Don would come over for dinner, he could join in when Cassandra was telling Alexander about their mother, the mother he was too young to remember.

It was a surreal feeling to see your mother on a milk carton and it pained Cassandra to know her brother best knew their mother from making his morning bowl of cereal. Alexander would be turning ten soon and would start middle school next year. Cassandra was terrified, at Alex's small private elementary school, his teachers made it clear no amount of harassment would be tolerated towards Alex about his mother but he would be going to a much larger private academy for middle school and Cassandra knew kids could be cruel. They certainly had been when she was his age and she wanted to spare her baby brother the same fate. The Goths were an eccentric bunch and while Mortimer was loving, his own unique beliefs had definitely influenced his permissive parenting style, wanting his children to experiment as they saw fit and the children's eccentricities had made them easy targets. Bella had kept things from getting too out of hand and had spent many afternoons comforting her daughter after being made fun of for being weird again. She always knew what to say and Cassandra missed her guidance more than anything.

There were so many questions she wished she could ask her, so many things she wished she could tell her. It killed her to know she could never ask her mother's opinion of her wedding dress or to confide she was afraid she was screwing Alexander up. Her mother's absence was felt everyday but it seemed especially magnified as her wedding day drew closer.

She wanted to believe her mother was still with her in some way, still guiding her long after her disappearance. She sometimes wondered if her mother had something to do with her meeting Don or had ever helped her when she didn't know what to do with Alexander and she often thought of what she would say if she could see her one last time.

She wanted to believe her mother would be found one day, if only so she could be laid next to Mortimer when his time came. A plot in the Goth family cemetery was set aside for her in case she was. Her wedding was going to be a small, intimate gathering in the family's backyard and the wedding arch had already been set up facing the graveyard, plastic chairs placed on the lawn ready to seat their guests. Mortimer had insisted on arranging the chairs this way, believing anything else would offend the spirits of their loved ones in the Goth family graveyard. This was a superstition of his Cassandra didn't mind and she obliged, setting up the chairs so the "ghosts" could see her marry.

She had decided to wear her mother's wedding gown to her ceremony. If her mother couldn't be there, at least some small part of her would be with her. She didn't expect to cry when she tried on the dress for the first time and she didn't expect her mother's thirty year old wedding dress would fit her like a glove, like it was made for her just as much as it had been for her mother.

She slumped against her bedroom wall, trying her best not to cry. Bella Goth was gone but she knew that somehow, she was still there.