Down The Plot Hole: New Math
What it boiled down to was this: by the time Alice turns thirteen, they no longer have the funds to keep the house. The little yellow house, with Dinah's grave in the backyard and the memories of Dad clinging to every surface is sold and an apartment in the city nearer to Mom's job is secured instead. She's not happy: she's not even close to being happy, but she is trying to be an adult. She is trying to be mature. She doesn't complain about the move, about leaving behind her friends, about having to start over. She knows it isn't any easier on her mother than it is on her, so she tries to help.
Which is why, when Mom is busy ironing out the details with her work for longer hours, she drags a bunch of empty boxes into the study.
She takes care of the solid stuff first; the collection of ships in bottles, the plastic Godzilla, the books. She wraps up the fragile items with care and stacks the books so they won't be bent when they're finally able to be unpacked. Then she begins on the papers.
She doesn't know what is important and what is it: they're all very much official looking, with the names of different universities (or government agencies, or think tanks) stamped along the bottom and words with five or six syllables in them sprinkled liberally about. She ends up sorting them by subject: psychiatry in the one, finance in the two, and personal in the three.
This is how she finds the papers: the ones from the detectives, the private eyes, the insurance company. The people who have a vested interest in finding out whether her father is dead, and what he's up to if he's alive.
To her very great shock, he is alive. He is.
The police had received a tip about a man matching Robert Hamilton's description boarding a train. The insurance company had found that he had purchased tickets to Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, and Prague. The private detectives had found no trace of him in either city, something Alice would later cling to, but for now…
She had thought he was dead. If they could not find you soon, you were made legally dead, and after the year had passed, after another March 23 came and went, she had figured that was it. Her father was dead, taken from them, likely a victim of some random, violent act. She would never see him again because he was no longer possible to see.
But he's not dead. And no one told her.
She doesn't hear her mother pull into the driveway, or come through the front door, and her call upon finding Alice in the study doesn't register until Mom's arms are around her.
"Dad's alive," Alice mumbles, turning slighting to return the embrace. "He just left."
"I know," Mom replies. "I know. I'm so sorry, baby. You don't deserve this."
The assurance strikes her as odd, and then she wonders if Mom might possibly be telling her another lie, something to soothe the ache of reality. Maybe she does deserve this. Maybe it's her fault.
She can't know that, however. Not from her mother, who loves her enough to try and create her own little bubble of falsehood for her to live in. The only person who can tell her is the man who is not at home, or in Buenos Aires, or Hong Kong, or Prague.
She'll spend the next ten years trying to get her answer.