Clarise Miller gawked at the phone she clutched tightly in her shaking hands. “There’s no way,” she mumbled aloud, not caring if anyone else in her classroom heard her. How could this be real? She clicked on the account that showed a seemingly sweet-looking woman in the picture, along with three small children at her side. All smiling; all the spitting images of their mother.

Tears pooled on her lashes, but she hurriedly blinked them back, not daring to let anyone see and have something else to make fun of her for. She raised her hand and asked to be excused, blurting the first random excuse to come to mind. As soon as she was out the door and out of view of any classroom windows, she raced down the hall as fast as she could to the nearest girls bathroom, locking the stall and slumping against the door.

She tried regaining her composure with little success, and pulled out her phone with trembling fingers. She couldn’t do more than stare at the picture for a few minutes. Searching the faces that smiled back. Scanning for an unfamiliar characteristic and waiting for her mind to stop tricking her. How could this account exist?

She tried to swallow, but her mouth and throat had gone desert-dry. She scrolled to the account details under the woman’s name, and she nearly choked upon realizing that the account had been active only minutes before she found it. She couldn’t stifle her tears any longer, and a whimper escaped her lips as she sank to the grimy bathroom floor.

She let the reality of her situation sink in as her whimpering turned to heaving sobs, and she wanted nothing more than to click on the profile and ask a million questions. Questions like, “How could you leave me behind?” and “Where have you been the last 12 years?”

Her heart seemed to be breaking in her chest as she gazed down at her three year old self in the profile picture, her Mother’s arm draped across her and her older sister’s shoulder’s. Her older brother cheesed in the middle of the young girls, making her wail even louder at the memory of his toothy smile. Where had they ALL been for these past years?

Clarise sucked in a final, shuddering breath, and stood shakily to her feet. So many thoughts swirled around her mind until she felt dizzy. She doubted the reality of her situation, as it just seemed too deranged to be true. Her mother, who had disappeared more than a decade ago with her brother and sister, had a profile on a dating app. When she had looked up her mom’s name on the platform, she hadn’t expected to actually find her profile. She had done it as a joke, as a way to entertain her fantasy that maybe, just maybe, she would find them someday.

She hadn’t realized her world would come crashing down on her the instant she searched for Deborah Miller, and her mother’s picture smiled back up at her.

She gulped down her anxiety as her finger hovered over the message button on the screen… Should I do it? The thought tumbled back and forth in her mind as she thought of the incident 12 years ago.

All she could remember was her father telling her that “Mommy is going on a vacation for a while,” and that her brother and sister were leaving with her. This was after, of course, her mom had already left. For years after, Clarise had dealt with the burden of her drunken father, her relentless bullies, and all with no one to turn to. She had longed as a child for her mother to come swooping back in to take Clarise with her on her seemingly endless “vacation.” As a teenager, her longing had turned into cold hatred, and hidden behind her hardened resolve was an abandoned, broken heart. Why had her own mother deserted her? And why hadn’t she been good enough to take along with her, like her siblings?

The endless questions plagued her for years, and they all came flooding in at once when she caught that first glimpse of her mom and siblings’ matching broad smiles.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she forced herself to press the message button, and when she opened them, a blinking cursor leered at her. What would she say? She didn’t know, but she did know that she needed answers.

She knew that she was going to get them, too, by any means necessary. Clarise resolved that she would search for her long-lost mother and siblings, finding out what happened to her family. She told herself she would follow them to the ends of the earth if she had to.

And so the search began.