…”Hannah never went missing. She left. And the man who printed that flyer is the reason she had to.”
I didn’t move. I could hear our vet on the phone in the back, talking to the sheriff in a low voice.
“My name is Sam,” he said. “I’m her husband. She’d want me to tell you, so you don’t feel like you have to hide anything. You can call her. Right now, if you want.” He wrote a number on the back of one of our appointment cards and slid it across the counter.
The sheriff’s deputy arrived ten minutes later and took the card. She stepped outside to make the call. When she came back in, she looked at the flyer for a long time. Then she took it off the wall.
Three years ago, Hannah Pruitt had walked away from a boyfriend who’d been hurting her for a long time. She took her dog and nothing else. She went into a state program that keeps survivors’ addresses confidential. And then he’d reported her missing, and printed hundreds of flyers with her photo, and hung them in every vet’s office, every grocery store and every gas station within fifty miles.
“It’s a way to find someone,” the deputy said quietly. “You make the whole town look for her for you.”
The microchip was the only thing Hannah had never changed. It still had her old address on it. If any clinic had called the number on that flyer instead of the sheriff, he would have found her in a day.
Hannah called our clinic that afternoon and thanked our vet for picking up the phone to the right person. We updated the chip registration with her privately, through the sheriff’s office.
The deputy took down every copy of the flyer in the county that week. A few days later, Sam brought the golden retriever back to have her paw checked. Her name is Maisy. Hannah came with them this time. She stood in our lobby, right where the flyer used to be, and said, “I like this spot better without me on it.”
