It’s the morning of Nina Landry’s fortieth birthday. She’s supposed to have her kids ready to leave for the Christmas holidays with her new boyfriend. But her fifteen-year-old daughter, Charlie, is not yet home. She spent the night at a friend’s, and now she is nowhere to be found. As time passes slower and slower by the hour, Nina’s worry builds to panic. Has Charlie run away, or has something worse happened? And why won’t anyone—not the cops, not Charlie’s friends, not Charlie’s father—take her disappearance seriously? As day turns to night and a series of ominous revelations leads Nina from sickening suspicion to blood-chilling certainty, she comes to the desperate realization that she has no one to turn to…but herself.