Eight-year-old Carmel has always been different--sensitive, distracted, with an heart-stopping tendency to go missing. Her mother Beth, newly single, worries about her daughter's strangeness, especially as she is trying to build a new life for the two of them. When she takes Carmel to a local festival, her worst fear is realized: Carmel disappears into the crowd. Unable to accept the possibility that her daughter might be gone forever, Beth embarks on a mission to find her. Meanwhile, Carmel begins an extraordinary and terrifying journey of her own. But do the real clues to Carmel's disappearance lie in the otherworldly qualities her mother had only begun to guess at? --Publisher