Annaliese knocked over the extra chair, hurrying after the man she thought was Leonard. As she struggled through the crowded bar patio and out onto the street, she heard Art calling after her, but she didn’t answer.

Art would be angry she had run off, but she hoped he would understand. He knew all about Leonard.

Annaliese had last seen her cousin Leonard at their family’s Passover dinner eighteen years ago, thousands of miles away in suburban New Jersey.

Now she was chasing him through the shadows of late night Santiago, Chile. She was on vacation, for Christ's sake. And what about Leonard? What was he doing here, so far away? He walked a half block ahead, unaware of her presence, a small dog on a leash skipping at his side.

The street was quiet and empty – unusual, Annaliese thought. From what she’d experienced so far this trip, Santiago bloomed alive at night. Annaliese and Art had been relaxing on the patio of a crowded, dimly lit bar off of the Bellavista district’s main drag not an hour earlier.

During the daytime the entertainment district was silent, the inhabitants sleeping off their hangovers in preparation for another night of barhopping and dancing. At night the graffiti-and-mural-covered concrete buildings pulsed with music and activity. There was a line around the corner of the reggae club across the street.

Annaliese and Art drank sticky sweet pisco sours while Art thumbed through their Intrepid Traveler’s Guide to Chile, looking for something fun to do the next day. This was their first big trip together, after almost a year and a half of dating. Art had recently been in touch with some of his distant cousins that lived in Santiago, and they had invited him for a visit. He’d been reticent at first. He wasn’t much of a traveler and had never felt the need to do a homeland visit, but Annaliese had talked him into it. No way you’re passing this up, she’d said. You’re going, and I’m coming with you.

Art read aloud from the guidebook while Annaliese watched the packs of well-dressed young people wandering from bar to nightclub to the late night cafés further downtown.

When they’d arrived in Santiago last week, Annaliese had wondered what the hell they were doing. The hotel was in a neighborhood of run-down buildings and new, vacant skyscrapers. Not a single person in sight. They walked a few blocks, Art gripping Annaliese’s hand tightly, and she knew he was thinking this was a mistake. And then they were in the middle of the Plaza de Armas, the open square packed with people holding up signs Annaliese couldn’t read. A funeral procession marched through the center of the plaza while a troupe of dancers whirled and stomped their feet alongside the pallbearers carrying the poncho-draped coffin. Annaliese and Art backed up and stood in a doorway while the procession passed by. Art asked a man standing nearby who the funeral was for. The man looked at Art and Annaliese and frowned, and then went in to a long answer that Annaliese didn’t understand. After the man finished his cigarette and walked away, Art told Annaliese the funeral was for Victor Jara. Annaliese had read about the folk singer in their guidebook – he’d been killed in the chaos after the coup back in 1973, thirty-five years earlier. Wait a second, Annaliese said. I know, said Art. They exhumed him to find out who had killed him, and I guess they’re reburying him with honors. There was something so strange about it, so completely foreign. Now the posters and signs with their grainy old photos made sense. So many people had been lost back then. Annaliese picked out the Spanish words desaparecido and perdido on the banners hanging out of the windows of the shopping complex across the plaza. Disappeared and lost. She felt tired and sad and wanted to leave. Come on, she told Art, let’s go.

They tried to get money from an ATM, but their cards kept getting rejected. Annaliese worried that the machines would take the cards away from them, and then what? On the verge of crying, Annaliese made Art go ask a teller to come help them. Oh, the teller said, watching Art make another denied transaction. You have to choose the “extranjero” option, because you are strangers. You are not from here.

Annaliese had never felt more like an outsider than she did in Santiago. The guidebooks had not prepared her for the bombed out buildings near La Moneda, now spiffed up with brightly painted murals. Even buying snacks at the grocery store confused her; fruit had to be weighed and priced before getting to the register. And forget the exchange rate. 500 Chilean pesos still didn’t equal a dollar.

But as strange as Santiago felt, it was wonderful, too. Every night entire families mobbed the shopping district. The clubs in Las Condes overflowed with punk kids still dressed in their school uniforms. Their matching, regulation satchels were emblazoned with stickers and safety-pinned patches. Businessmen in suits drank cortados served by the leggy, spandexed girls in the Café Haiti “coffee with legs” hostess bars on every corner.

Leonard’s little dog strained against the leash and trotted ahead of Leonard and past a shuttered Café Caribe. Did he ever stop in for an oversexed cup of coffee? It seemed like something the Leonard that Annaliese had known would do, just for a laugh.

Annaliese’s mother and Leonard’s father were brother and sister. Even though Leonard was almost a decade older than Annaliese they had been close – they were the only kids in their families and they had been brought up together like siblings.

Annaliese was in seventh grade when Leonard moved to San Francisco. He didn’t come home much, except for Passover. When he did come home he stayed with their grandmother and Annaliese wondered why he didn’t stay with his parents. She tried to ask him about it once, as they made the haroset and matzo ball soup for the Passover Seder.

“Mom would like me to stay with them, but I won’t stay under his roof,” Leonard said.

“Uncle Simon?” Annaliese asked. “Why not?”

“We don’t get along,” Leonard said. He didn’t offer her anything else and she didn’t pry.

Their grandmother died when Annaliese was a sophomore in high school, Leonard’s mother a year later from a blood clot in her heart. Leonard stopped coming home after that.

Annaliese missed him and his yearly visits. Annaliese and her mom tried to make Passover as fun and full of tradition as it had been before, but it never felt right to her. They did not need to add the extra leaf to the table; it was just her family of three and her uncle. And Annaliese didn’t know how to talk to uncle Simon anymore. Simon didn’t initiate any conversations about Leonard and when Annaliese mentioned him her uncle listened politely but didn’t say anything. She wanted to share Leonard’s letters and the photos he sent her, but she didn’t think Leonard would want her to.

They didn’t even bother to get out the Haggadahs or the set of dishes that had belonged to her great-grandmother. Annaliese still set an extra place at the table – thinking of Leonard, not of the prophet Elijah. They ate so quickly and quietly, it hardly seemed worth the hours spent preparing the meal. After dinner Annaliese would drag the hall phone into her room and call Leonard.

“You can come do Passover with me next time,” Leonard promised her year after year, but they never made it happen.

During her first year of college, Annaliese discovered the Internet and email. Leonard had, of course, been online for at least a year already. You’re late to the party, Annie, he wrote her. He sent her links to all sorts of things he knew she’d like; his photography web site, music magazines and TV show fansites. She pinned copies of his photos to the walls of her dorm room. In one of them, a self-portrait, Leonard wore a goofy top hat and had his arm around the shoulders of a wooden cigar Indian in front of a bar. Several laughing men and women wearing New-Year’s-1996-emblazoned crowns leaned out of the front door to sneak in to the photo. Annaliese pictured herself there, another laughing woman trying to crash Leonard’s photo shoot. “My cousin’s a photographer in California,” she bragged to her friends when they asked about the photos.

Annaliese liked how mundane their email volleys could be – gossiping about the minor inconveniences of their days, exchanging audio files of their favorite bands. They talked about boys, too. Leonard had a boyfriend in San Francisco – and he teased his little cousin about her rock star crushes and constantly asked her if she had a real boyfriend yet. Leonard had never come out to Annaliese in any official way. He’d told her about his college boyfriend like it was nothing, and she liked that. It made her feel special; as though Leonard regarded her as an equal, as an adult. The realization that Leonard’s gayness was probably the source of his problems with his father didn’t come until later. Annaliese felt embarrassed thinking about it. It was a stupid thing to break up a family over. They were better than that, her family. Or at least they should have been.

Leonard walked the dog away from Patio Bellavista. Annaliese thought he might be heading towards Calle Loreto. She and Art had combed through the shops on Loreto earlier in the day. Art hadn’t wanted to do anything except hang out by the murky pool in their hotel. We’re on vacation, Annaliese had said. If you wanted to spend the whole trip indoors we could have stayed home. She’d been about to leave the hotel, extra room key in hand, when Art relented and joined her on her walk through several neighborhoods they hadn’t explored before. She’d tried to get Art to invite his cousins to join them for lunch or for supper but he kept finding excuses not to call them. Annaliese couldn’t understand Art’s reluctance. If they were her cousins, she’d have called them the minute their flight touched down in Santiago.

What was Leonard doing here? Santiago seemed an outrageous place for him to have ended up. He’d aged, of course. So had she. Annaliese wondered if Leonard would recognize her if she confronted him. She wasn’t the hero-worshipping twenty-one-year-old girl she’d been when she’d last spoken with Leonard. She was more cautious now, guarded, even though she didn’t want to be that way. As much as she loved Leonard she would say, that’s on you, cousin. You did this. What would he think of Art, the socially awkward, almost agoraphobic boyfriend she was finding less and less endearing as this trip wore on? She wanted to know what had brought Leonard so far from home.

The little dog, some kind of yippy terrier, barked and wagged its tail when Leonard stopped and took a dog treat out of his pocket. Annaliese darted into a doorway. She hoped he didn’t notice her shadow or the noise she made when she kicked a crushed beer can. They were the only two people out on the street. There were lights on in some of the apartments above the shuttered restaurants and stores.

She didn’t want to say anything to him until she was certain the man was Leonard. She had followed him before – at least, she thought it had been him at the time. She had trailed the not-Leonards through Chinatown, the hiking trail at Land’s End – once she’d even followed a man down into the BART station and across the bay to Oakland. She had been so certain it was him each time. But this time was different. This man’s gait matched Leonard’s exactly.

Leonard’s limp meant that his footsteps were uneven. Thump, drag thump, thump, drag thump. He had a mild case of cerebral palsy that manifested itself in the limp. So I’ll never be a tap dancer, who cares? Leonard had said once, the only time Annaliese could recall him talking about it.

Annaliese and Leonard made their way through the fashion district, a maze of alleys and streets, some packed with shops and others empty but for a warehouse here, an over-grown lot there. Half-dressed mannequins stared with their painted-on eyes at Annaliese through the grilles covering the shop windows.

At the next street corner Leonard paused, then crossed the street and skirted the edge of an empty lot, walking in the middle of the street. As Annaliese passed the lot, a snarling guard dog appeared out of nowhere and hurled his muscular, compact body at the chain link fence. Annaliese ran past the lot as quickly as she could. She slowed down when she saw Leonard a few yards away. He turned around at the sound of the guard dog, just out of the streetlight’s reach. She couldn’t see his face. She stared at him and tried to make out his features. Could he see her?

Though they hadn’t seen each other since Annaliese’s eighth grade graduation, Leonard had invited her to move out to San Francisco after she finished college.

“You’ll stay with us until you find a place,” he told her. “You’ll love it here, you’ll see.”

Annaliese didn’t know much about her new city. She’d read the Tales of the City books Leonard had made her get from the library. The rest of her San Francisco knowledge she based on Leonard’s photos. He sent her stacks of them. Some showed clean-cut boys sunbathing in Dolores Park next to hippie kids throwing Frisbees, bike messengers and bankers smoking and taking phone calls near the stock exchange. A punk show at the Bottom of the Hill nightclub, dozens of blurred hands waving in the air. She loved the snapshots he sent her from Halloween – hundreds of men and women in costumes milling around in the Castro while enormous rainbow flags fluttered behind them. His Chinatown photos, little old ladies with their red plastic grocery sacks and toothless men playing mahjongg, made Annaliese feel like she was in another world.

She packed up her car and set out a few weeks before Thanksgiving.

Annaliese was nervous and ecstatic to see Leonard again. It had been so long, and she knew they had both changed so much, but she was confident they could pick up where they had left off. She could already picture the cozy Thanksgiving dinner they would prepare together.

She told Leonard to expect her on November fifteenth, but due to a flat tire and storms in the Midwest, she didn’t arrive until a week later. She called him from Kansas but she only reached his voicemail. I’ll be there as soon as I can, can’t wait, she’d said.

She went straight to the address he had given her. The building didn’t look like much, and neither did the neighborhood. Three gaunt, twitchy men loitered outside the check-cashing store on the corner.

Annaliese got out of the car and walked up the front stoop to the row of mailboxes by the door. She jammed the buzzer to apartment 5E. A minute later a crackly speaker came to life.

A man’s voice asked, “Who is it?”

Not recognizing the voice she said, “It’s Annaliese, Leonard’s cousin.”

She wondered if this was Leonard’s boyfriend. She tried to remember his name but she drew a blank. Tim? Jim?

The man was quiet for a moment. Then he said, in a tired voice, “Come on up.”

The door clicked open and Annaliese climbed up the stairs. She wondered how Leonard managed them – or was there an elevator?

A tall, older man with a clean-shaven head stood in the doorway at the end of the hall. He had dark circles under his eyes and looked unnaturally pale. “I’m Tom,” he said.

“Hi,” Annaliese said. “You’re Leonard’s boyfriend, right?”

“Yes,” Tom said. He led Annaliese into a large living room furnished in comfortable, gently used modern furniture, soft light and sagging wall-to-wall bookshelves.

“That’s right,” Tom said, “I’m Leonard’s boyfriend. I mean, I think I still am.”

Annaliese felt her chest tightening.

“He was really excited for you to move here,” Tom said. “It’s all Lenny’s been talking about for the past couple months. That’s why this is so strange.”

“Wait,” Annaliese began. She had a metallic taste in her mouth. “I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

“He’s not here,” Tom said. “I have no idea where he’s gone. It’s been three days, and I am not sure there’s anything I can do about it.”

Annaliese felt queasy. She sat down on the couch. Tom asked her if she’d like something to drink.

“Whatever’s convenient,” Annaliese said. She folded her hands in her lap. She couldn’t stop them shaking.

Tom went into the kitchen. He returned a minute later with a couple of beers.

“Lenny took off on Monday,” Tom said, swigging some beer. He shook his head. “When I got home that night, he was gone. His things are still here. All he took was his wallet and keys. If he were planning to leave I’d think he’d take his stuff. Also the timing seems really strange, since he knew when you were coming.”

Annaliese fought back the urge to cry. “He didn’t say he was going anywhere when I talked to him last,” she said. “Everything was normal.”

“I know,” said Tom. He must have seen the look on Annaliese’s face.

“Don’t worry, okay? You can stay here just as you and Lenny planned, and tomorrow we’ll figure something out. How does that sound?” he asked her.

She nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe he’s just lost track of time, maybe he’ll be back in the morning.” She didn’t think Tom believed it either.

Tom picked up a small gift bag from under the table next to the couch.

“This is for you,” he said. “Lenny got it for you as a welcome to San Francisco present.” He handed the bag to Annaliese. Inside it was a Not For Tourists San Francisco Handbook and a roll of Muni tokens. A postcard of the painted ladies of Alamo Square was tucked into the book. Welcome home, Annie, it said, in Leonard’s angular handwriting. Annaliese shoved everything back into the bag and set it down on the floor. She’d look at it later. Leonard should be here to give it to her, not Tom. She and Tom drank their beers and sat together in uncomfortable silence.

Annaliese got up and went over to the wall near the window. It was covered in photographs, expertly matted and framed. “Are these all Leonard’s?” she asked Tom. He nodded. He walked over to join her.

“They are,” he said. “Does he look much different than he used to?”’

Annaliese squinted up at the photos. It had been a while since Leonard had sent her any self-portraits.

“He looks about the same to me,” she said. She pointed to a photo of Leonard and Tom together, on a park bench. “This is a nice one,” she said.

“That’s from our vacation in Turkey,” Tom said. He managed a slight smile. “It was our Christmas card last year.”

Annaliese had to smile, too. “Even though Leonard’s Jewish?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “We did those cheesy photo cards you can get at the drugstore.”

She studied the man in the frame. He was still the same Leonard, the same goofy smile, even though this Leonard looked older than she’d expected, and skinnier, wiry, too. A bit of stubble on his cheeks.

The way he leaned against Tom’s shoulder so confidently, the way his smile seemed to take up his whole face, Annaliese believed that Leonard was happy. Unless something had drastically changed since the photo was taken, she didn’t think he had disappeared of his own accord.

“Could someone have hurt him?” she wondered out loud.

“Oh, god, I hope not,” Tom said. “Do you really think it’s a possibility?”

Annaliese shrugged her shoulders. She said, “Well, at this point you know him better than I do.”

Tom thought. “Lenny knows some weird people – but no. Everyone loves Lenny. I don’t know. It’s really unfathomable to me. I feel like if he had gotten hurt or something I would know. I’d feel it, or something.” He sighed, rubbing his hands over the top of his head. “I can’t tell if this is Lenny being irresponsible, Lenny playing some kind of terrible joke, or what. And now that you’re here, I’m even more worried. Because he knew you were coming. I just know he’d be here for you.”

“Have you called the police?” Annaliese asked Tom.

“I did, when he didn’t come home after that first night. They said I could file a missing person’s report… but I haven’t done it yet.”

“Why not?” Annaliese asked. If it were up to her she’d have filed the report immediately. Tom stood up and walked to the window.

“What if he doesn’t want to be found?” he said, so softly Annaliese didn’t think she was meant to hear it.

“Why would you say that?” Annaliese asked. Her voice sounded strange to her – too shrill, cutting. “Do you know why he left?”

Tom turned around. “Of course not,” he said. His eyes were red and Annaliese could see he was trying not to cry. “It’s just… None of this makes any sense.”

Annaliese spent the night on the fold out sofa. She couldn’t sleep. Her body was tired but her mind raced. Her whole plan for San Francisco revolved around Leonard, but he was gone. It felt like she had a stack of bricks pressing down on her chest and something hard lodged in her throat. Somewhere upstairs a television was on all night long. Tom and Leonard’s bedroom door was closed but she thought she could hear Tom crying.

In the morning, as she waited for Tom to get out of the shower, Annaliese called her mom.

“So you finally got there, I bet Leonard is glad to have you,” said her mom.

“Leonard’s not here,” Annaliese said, trying not to sound too worried. “Actually, we’re not sure where he is.”

Annaliese’s mom demanded to know what was going on. “Well he has to be somewhere. Doesn’t his friend know where he is?”

“Tom doesn’t have any idea,” Annaliese said. “Hopefully he’ll come home today. Just… I don’t know. But I’m okay, though.” She heard the bathroom door open. “I’ve got to go for now. I’ll give you an update later.”

“What will I tell Simon?” Annaliese’s mom asked.

“I don’t know, tell him whatever you want, mom, I have to go,” Annaliese said.

Her first day in San Francisco was spent following Tom around the city. He had called most of their friends already but he wanted to check out some of Leonard’s old haunts. They went to a handful of grimy bars and cafés, stopped by the co-op house Leonard lived in when he first moved to California. No one had seen him at the Jewish deli on Polk Street where he sometimes grabbed lunch, and the SFMOMA security guard Leonard often stopped to talk with hadn’t seen him in over a week.

Hours later, back in the apartment, Tom made sandwiches. Annaliese pulled the crust apart and conjured an image of Leonard sitting here across from her in the small blue room. She wanted to yell at him, to grab him by his shoulders and shake him. You invited me here, Leonard. And I’m here. And where the fuck are you?

Tom pushed his plate aside.

He said, “I think it’s time to file a missing person’s report.”

Tom went to the police station by himself. He returned with a copy of the report he had filed. The police officer hadn’t sounded hopeful.

“Adults disappear all the time,” she told Tom. “We’ll do what we can, but we can’t guarantee we’ll find him or that if we do, he’ll want to come home.”

Annaliese didn’t know what to tell her family. Her mother called her for updates almost every day, but there was never any news. Her uncle had called, too, talking first with Annaliese and then, after a long pause, he asked to speak with Tom. Tom took the phone into the bedroom and Annaliese didn’t know what they’d talked about, but a few days later a check arrived for Tom from Uncle Simon.

“He’s paying for a private investigator,” Tom told her. “Believe that? The first time he acknowledges his son in forever and it’s to try to find him because he’s fucking disappeared.” Tom kicked the baseboard in the hallway.

Annaliese stayed on Tom and Leonard’s fold out couch for two months. Tom wasn’t in a rush for her to move out. As he said to her over breakfast most mornings, “It’s nice to have someone else around. It makes me feel less lonely.”

Annaliese understood. She felt the same way. Every phone call, every ring of the doorbell made Annaliese feel giddy and heavy with dread at the same time. A good day was a day with a lead; either from the investigator or from the findlenny.com site Tom had set up. The detective’s reports were thorough – he emailed Tom a timeline showing Leonard’s last known movements.

That last day, Leonard took the bus downtown (the driver was quoted as saying, “Lenny looked a little distracted but he still asked me how my son was doing.”) and walked to his photography studio in an old warehouse at Second and Folsom. The painter who had the adjacent workspace had just made coffee and she poured Leonard a cup. They smoked a cigarette out the window in the painter’s studio and then she had to get back to work. She heard Leonard moving stuff around in his space but when the detective asked her to take a look and see if anything looked out of the ordinary, she couldn’t say. She just shrugged her shoulders, said that she hadn’t been in there much and that other than Leonard and his favorite camera, it didn’t seem that anything else was missing.

The detective showed Tom and Annaliese grainy black and white footage from the Transbay Terminal bus station, a few seconds of a man who could have been Leonard buying a bus ticket to San Diego. None of them could be sure, and the ticket had been bought in cash. After a few more weeks on the case the detective told Tom he’d hit a dead end. It isn’t right to keep taking your money, he said. Good luck to you.

Tom and Annaliese were left to their own devices. They put up fresh posters every couple of weeks. When they heard reports of unidentified bodies pulled from the bay or skeletal remains found in the Oakland hills everything would stop. Annaliese would sit still, almost catatonic on the couch until Tom came home from talking to the police. The dead men were never Leonard. They were someone else’s tragedy.

Annaliese had moved to San Francisco longing to be Leonard’s kid sister again, his sidekick. She’d thought her post-college adult life would be cocktail parties and passionate discussions about literature. Afternoons picnicking in Golden Gate Park. They’d go out every night. She’d hold Leonard’s camera bag and equipment while he shot roll after roll of breathtaking photos. Her English degree would get her a writing job, and she’d meet the boy book-geek of her dreams when they reached for the same newly translated edition of The Master and Margarita at Dog-Eared Books.

Instead she felt as though she was treading water, waiting for Leonard to return and for her new life to really begin.

As she searched the classifieds every morning looking for a job and an affordable place to live of her own, she always scanned the faces of the other passengers on her bus, and always looked homeless people in the eye. She hoped that one day she would recognize Leonard.

She got a job at the San Francisco Public Library. She spent her days sorting and shelving books. On her breaks she sometimes took her lunch out into United Nations Plaza, where she watched the people camped out by the concrete-slab fountain. She dreaded finding Leonard among them, but at the same time she hoped to see him out there one day. She moved out of Tom and Leonard’s apartment into a tiny efficiency with a shared bathroom. It was perfect for what she needed at the time.

The MISSING posters she and Tom plastered up all over town grew faded and old. Sometimes she would catch part of Leonard’s photo peeking out from under other fliers on the public notice boards at the coffee shop or Laundromat.

Annaliese and Tom met for dinner every now and again, to check up on each other and talk about Leonard. Tom was convinced that Leonard would come home. They had been together for six years, four of them living together in the apartment Tom still called home. When Leonard’s magazine subscription to Photo Monthly expired, Tom renewed it for him.

As much as it seemed impossible to Annaliese at the time, life went on. Months passed into years. She still looked for Leonard when she was in a crowd, but it was more out of habit than anything else.

A mobile phone rang out. Annaliese panicked, thinking it was hers, but she remembered her purse was hanging on the back of Art’s chair.

She hadn’t thought to grab it before she ran out of the bar. She was wandering around this unfamiliar city without her wallet or her phone. She was suddenly frightened to be out and about without even some emergency cash or her passport. Her Spanish was rudimentary at best. She relied on Art to speak for both of them on this trip, even though he was still so shy and half the time she didn’t think she was getting the full story from him.

She pictured Art still sitting at their table, confused. He’d stay there for a little while, but by now he had probably paid their bill and gone out to look for her. No, Art wouldn’t venture out on his own. Instead, he’d hail a cab back to the hotel where he would pace the floor of their little room in Santiago’s only Indian-themed Best Western hotel until she returned. Their room smelled like curry and fresh paint from the renovations they hadn’t been told about before their arrival.

Art would be worried about her, maybe a little angry, but his anger would be more directed at having had to wait for her at the bar, at having had to interact with strangers without her there as a buffer. He might even be glad she’d taken off, given him an excuse to go back to the room.

Leonard answered the phone. “¿Bueno?” he said, then, “Hello?” in Spanish he sounded like a stranger, but in English he sounded like he could be Leonard, Leonard with a slight accent. He lowered his voice while he talked. Annaliese couldn’t hear any more of the conversation. From the way he kept walking, she didn’t think he had seen her yet.

Several years after Leonard’s disappearance, Annaliese got a call from Tom.

“Annie, it’s Tom,” he said. “I have news.”

Annaliese gasped. She had thought about this call so many times before, had waited for it, but she hadn’t thought it would actually come. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Wait,” she said. “It’s news about Leonard?”

“Oh, no, honey, it’s not. I’m sorry, I should have phrased that a little better.” He paused. “No… it’s actually… well, I guess you could say in some way it might be about Lenny.”

“Tom, come on, what’s happened?” Annaliese leaned against the doorway of her kitchenette, the handset tucked between her neck and her shoulder.

“I got a job offer in Ohio,” Tom said. “At first my reaction was to say a flat out no way, but I got to thinking…. Leonard’s been missing for four years. I’ve had my hopes up all this time. That he’d come back. But, Annie, I really think I need to take this job, you know?”

“Of course, Tom,” she said. “I completely understand.”

“I’m glad you get it,” he said. “I’ve got to ask you something. You can say no, I’ll understand, but I hope you’ll hear me out. I thought maybe you’d want to move in to my place.”

Annaliese didn’t know what to say.

Tom continued, “Here’s my reasoning. What if Lenny comes back? If I’m not there, will he disappear again? If you lived here then at least if Lenny came back someone who cares about him would know.” He paused. “I can’t stop thinking about it, even though I know I should.”

“Jesus, Tom.” She paused. You can say no, Annaliese thought. If Leonard came back he’d be smart enough to look them up in the phone book or online. He would know that they might not still be living there. Then again, if Leonard came back, the apartment would be the first place he’d go, wouldn’t it?

“How much is your rent?” Annaliese asked.

“I’ve been there for over ten years, Annie,” Tom said. “So it’s very nicely rent controlled. I pay eight hundred fifty a month. If I sublet to you, the rent won’t go up.”

“Plus utilities or are they separate?” Annaliese found herself asking.

“Oh, my dear, they are included.”

They never talked about it, but she understood that this was Tom’s way of doing something nice for her. She’d looked after him after Leonard’s disappearance and now it was his turn to help her.

She took the apartment, moving in only a few days after Tom moved out. And she still lived there today.

She had told Art the whole story shortly after they began dating. He lived in 5B, just a few doors down the hall from her. He’d never heard Leonard’s story before. He found it to be incredible - a weird, sad mystery. He kept a revolving slideshow of Leonard photos as his computer screensaver. Annaliese knew he searched for Leonard in crowds, too.

Art would never disappear. He was a homebody. When they met, Annaliese knocking on doors up and down the hall looking to borrow some sugar for cookies she was baking, Art opened the door to his apartment for the first time all weekend. He was a software developer and could work from home most days. Given the choice, Art always preferred to stay home. Annaliese tried to understand it. She knew one of Art’s uncles and two of his older cousins had been kidnapped and disappeared in Chile right after the coup. They had been taken from their home at gunpoint. Even though he hadn’t been born when it happened the tragedy of it had been with his family ever since. Art needed the safety of four walls and a door that locked.

Leonard was still on the phone. He slowed his pace. Annaliese slowed down, too. They were getting closer to the Mapocho River. Annaliese could smell the rotting trash stench of the water. The street they were on must be within a couple of blocks of the river. Leonard closed his mobile phone with a quick snap. He put it back in his pocket.

His limp seemed less pronounced the longer Annaliese watched him. She’d been so sure it was Leonard but now she felt a twinge of doubt. The neighborhood was dark. There were a couple of feeble streetlights in the middle of the block but they didn’t do much more than illuminate the dumpsters at the curb and the rats scuttling around them.

The hotel concierge had warned Annaliese and Art from going to the large public market that ran parallel to the river. “It’s not a place for tourists,” he told Art, in Spanish, who in turn translated this for Annaliese.

Now the market was on her right, the stalls covered in tarps and pieces of plywood for a few more hours until they opened for business at first light. What was she doing there? Why would Leonard be out walking his dog in such a dicey area?

Annaliese could see the lights on the skyscrapers downtown, but between the street and the skyscrapers, the city was dark. Leonard’s little dog lifted his leg against a pile of black trash bags. Leonard stopped walking, and several doorways behind him, Annaliese froze.

“Vamos a casa,” she heard Leonard say. Something crashed up ahead, some crates tumbling over, or maybe a truck? Whatever it was it startled Leonard. He dropped the dog’s leash, and the dog darted into the shadows.

“Fuck,” Leonard cursed in English, surprising Annaliese. And then she heard him limping towards her, his bad foot scraping the sidewalk.

She heard a jingling sound and the dog shot past her, trailing his leash. She made a grab for it but it kept going. She chased the dog onto a well-lit footbridge over the river. On the other side of the bridge she saw an illuminated flashing sign advertising an all-night supermarket. She knew now where she was: at the edge of the shopping district near the grocery store where she and Art bought their chocolate bars and bananas.

She caught up with the dog in the middle of the bridge, stepping on the leash and then reaching down to pick him up. She cradled the dog in her arms while she caught her breath. She heard the sound of uneven steps nearby, and she knew who it was without even turning around. The man she thought was Leonard stood at the foot of the bridge.

“¿Has visto un perrito?” he asked. Then, because she didn’t reply, he asked her in English, “Have you seen a small dog?”

The man was still halfway in the shadows at the end of the bridge so she couldn’t see his face. She turned around.

“I caught him for you,” she said. She set the dog down on the bridge and clutched the leash in her hand. She didn’t move, even when the dog strained at the leash and began yipping at its owner. The man stepped towards her.

“Thank you,” the man said. He hesitated for a moment. Did he know her? After so many years and thousands of miles, was there still something of the younger, adventure-hungry, naïve Annaliese left for him to recognize? She waited for him to run up to her open-mouthed, for him to say “Annaliese? Is it really you?”

He walked up onto the bridge. He met them where Annaliese stood, and he reached for the leash. He slid the loop of the leash over his arm, bent down and scratched the dog behind his ears and cooed at him for a moment.

“Thanks,” he said again, standing back up stiffly, favoring his right leg. The light from the lamppost was bright and for the first time all night Annaliese got a good look at him.

Annaliese stared at him, into an older version of the face she had committed to memory, Leonard’s face from the MISSING posters.

“Leonard,” she said, louder than she intended. “Leonard?”

He gaped at her, his eyes wide, his arms hanging at his sides uselessly. He looked her up and down – did she really look so different? And then a confused look washed over his face and he said, “Annie?” it came out in a low croak and at first she didn’t understand what he’d said.

She said “what?” at the same moment he said “Annaliese?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, “It’s me,” and then she dissolved into tears as her cousin enveloped her in a big bear hug, and didn’t let go.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, squeezing her hard, rocking her, while the dog jumped against their legs and tried to get their attention. “Annaliese. What are you doing here? How did you – how did you find me?”

“I’m on vacation,” was all she could say. There was no way to distill the past decade down to a few sentences. Annaliese didn’t know how long they stood there, but finally Leonard let go of her. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

“Let’s get you back to where you’re staying,” he said.

“You won’t leave,” Annaliese said, thinking, you won’t leave again. I won’t let you.

He didn’t reply.

Leonard slung his arm over her shoulder and they walked back to the hotel, passing the iron-latticed Estacion Mapocho, stopping for a minute to admire a wheat paste poster of a nineteenth-century man with a handlebar mustache and the lifeless limbs of a conjoined twin sprouting from his belly. Leonard took his phone from his pocket and snapped a quick photo of it.

“Sorry,” he said. “Old habit.”

“You got a new camera?” she asked, picturing Leonard’s photography equipment carefully stored in Tom’s closet until he moved to Ohio, when they had finally sold the lot of it to a pair of students looking for second-hand gear.

“Yeah,” Leonard said. Annaliese waited for more, but he didn’t elaborate. Was his silence purely because he was shocked to see her, or was it something else? Was he already planning his next escape? She led him down the street to the hotel. The lobby was dark. Annaliese knocked on the front door and a moment later the groggy, half-asleep night concierge appeared to unlock the door for them.

Annaliese tried the door to her room. Art had locked it. She knocked softly, and then louder, and then she heard Art’s voice on the other side of the door. “Who is it?” he asked.

“Me,” Annaliese said.

Art flung open the door. He grabbed her by the arms, pulled her into the room. “I was so worried, Annaliese, where were you? Fuck. I looked everywhere.” He said, “The carabineros are looking for you, and the embassy… What the hell were you thinking?”

“I found him,” she said, stepping aside to reveal Leonard and his dog. Art blinked his eyes, stared at Leonard.

“It’s Leonard,” he said, unnecessarily. “This is fucking crazy. How the - How are you here?” Art shook his head. “Anyone else need a drink?” he asked.

“Please,” said Annaliese. She locked the door behind them and motioned for Leonard to sit down on the chair beside the TV. The farthest spot away from the door. Leonard unclipped his dog’s leash.

“This is Nito,” he said.

Annaliese nodded. Art passed around mugs of pisco. He squeezed Annaliese’s shoulder and went to sit in front of the door.

Annaliese sat on the edge of the bed and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. Leonard picked up Nito and settled him on his lap. He lifted his mug to his lips.

“Leonard,” Annaliese said, after taking a mouthful of pisco. “Start from the beginning.”

“It’s… it’s a long story, Annie,” he warned. He glanced out the window, said, “It’s so late, maybe I should –”

“No,” Annaliese said, almost yelling the word. “You’re not going anywhere.”