Sometimes people ask me what my biggest fear is.
It’s not ghosts, not planes, not the dark.

My biggest fear is a staircase.

A narrow, creaking staircase in an old building in lower Manhattan. The place my daughter walked up one Friday night with a plastic bag of videotapes in her hand… and simply never came back down.

My daughter’s name is Camden. When I close my eyes I still see her exactly how she was at 36: hair always tied back when she was focused, paint on her fingers, a little too serious for her age until she laughed and everything softened. She was an artist, but also the kind of person who paid bills on time, wrote grocery lists, and double-checked everyone’s appointments. Gentle, methodical, always half-listening to the world.

She lived with Michael, her partner. He was twenty years older, quiet to the point people sometimes didn’t notice when he’d finished his sentence. He did theatre for a while, then moved into the gallery world, hanging other people’s art, keeping careful notes in little spiral notebooks. They were not dramatic people. They liked early mornings, cheap wine, and old movies from a little video shop on Park Row.

They also liked their loft at 76 Pearl Street more than they ever admitted out loud. The building was old, the stairs slanted, and the radiators were moody, but the rent was stabilized. In Manhattan, that’s like winning a small lottery. Their home had high ceilings, plants by the window, wooden beams, and a view of nothing special that somehow looked beautiful at sunrise. It was the kind of place you imagine when you’re young and broke and trying to build a life in the city.

If you’ve ever lived in an old building, you know there’s always a story about the landlord. The one at 76 Pearl was Robert Rodriguez. He owned the locksmith shop downstairs and the apartments above it. People in the building didn’t talk about him loudly, but they did talk. “He wants everyone out so he can raise the rents,” someone once told my daughter. I remember her shrugging, but I could see she believed it.

In the autumn of 1997 the heat started to fail. Not “a little chilly” fail. We’re talking cold air slipping through windows, radiators that clicked and coughed and then gave up for nights at a time. Tenants complained. Some just pulled on extra sweaters and muttered on the stairs. But others were angry enough to talk about withholding rent if nothing changed.

Camden knew contracts. She’d been working part time in real estate. So she volunteered to write the letter.

She called me that morning and laughed about it, like it was just another adult thing she had to do.

“Mom, I’m the building’s lawyer now,” she joked. “Pro bono.”

She brought the letter down to Rodriguez that same morning, November 7th. By every account, nothing dramatic happened. No yelling, no slammed doors, no threats in the hallway. Just my daughter, calm and firm, explaining that the tenants expected functioning heat and were prepared to pause payments if they didn’t get it.

If there was a moment where everything shifted, it might have been that. But nobody realized it at the time.

That evening, Camden and Michael did what they’d done a hundred times before. They walked out into the cool Financial District air, wandered over to the video store on Park Row, and picked out a movie: “Addicted to Love.” The clerk remembered them later. They were relaxed. Polite. Just another couple choosing a Friday night film.

A neighbor saw them coming back toward 76 Pearl somewhere between 7 and 8 p.m. Camden had the plastic video bag swinging from her hand. Michael was beside her, coat collar pulled up against the cold. The streets were mostly empty; back then the financial district turned into a ghost town on weekends. Offices went dark. The narrow streets belonged to whoever happened to be walking them.

They reached their building.

They opened that front door.

They started up that crooked staircase.

And in every official record that exists, that is where they disappear.

I didn’t know any of this yet. All I knew was that my phone stayed silent.

At first I told myself it was nothing. Camden wasn’t glued to her phone. She could go a day or two without calling if she was busy painting. But after a couple of days, the feeling in my stomach changed from “I’m sure she’s fine” to something small, heavy, and cold.

By the time almost a week had passed with no answer, I stopped pretending I wasn’t scared.

I took the train into the city with the spare key she’d given me years earlier. That ride felt like it lasted forever. Every station we passed, I thought, “She might be here. She might be sitting on this train right now and I just haven’t seen her.”

When I reached 76 Pearl, my hands were shaking. I knew the building. I’d walked those stairs plenty of times to visit them. But that day, every creak sounded different, like the wood was warning me.

I unlocked the door to their loft, pushed it open, and stepped into a room where time had stopped.

Her running coat was hanging by the door, the one she wore when she went out early for her jogs. Michael’s wallet lay neatly on the table next to the little tray where he kept coins and receipts. Their passports and credit cards were in a drawer. A painting sat on the easel by the window, half-finished, brushstrokes still open like a sentence waiting for its final word.

The plants near the window were just beginning to sag — not dead yet, just as if they’d been waiting a little too long for someone to water them.

The videotape they’d rented was next to the TV.

Still in its plastic wrapper.

I stood there, hearing nothing but the blood pounding in my ears, and felt something inside me drop. It wasn’t like walking into an apartment after someone left for a trip. Nothing was missing. No suitcase. No hastily packed bag. No sign of a rushed departure.

It felt like the room was holding its breath.

I called the police.

To their credit, they took it seriously. Maybe it was the untouched wallets and passports. Maybe it was the unopened videotape. Maybe it was the way my voice sounded when I kept repeating, “They would not just leave.”

The missing persons reports were filed. Detectives from the Manhattan South squad came to the loft. They moved slowly, carefully, scanning everything. They found no signs of struggle. No blood. No overturned furniture. Nothing that said, “Here. This is where something went terribly wrong.”

The dust on the table showed there hadn’t been any cleanup. It looked exactly like a normal Friday night, paused.

They talked to neighbors. Some hadn’t seen my daughter or Michael at all that weekend. One remembered hearing raised voices from somewhere below late on Friday night, but in old buildings sound travels like it has its own agenda. A shout from the street can sound like it’s coming from your neighbor’s bathroom. No one could say for sure where the voices came from, or who they belonged to.

Then they spoke with the landlord.

Rodriguez confirmed that yes, he’d received Camden’s letter about the heat that morning. No, he hadn’t seen them afterward. He answered without hesitation, but with as little detail as humanly possible. He didn’t offer theories. He didn’t ask many questions. He did not seem especially upset that two of his tenants had just vanished.

At first, he was just someone who might help add context.

Then things got stranger.

Detectives tried to schedule a follow-up interview. By then I knew their names; I was calling them almost daily. One day, one of them told me Rodriguez wasn’t at his place upstate in Slate Hill. His family thought he’d gone to Manhattan to talk to the police.

But he hadn’t.

For nearly two weeks, nobody seemed to know where he was. Not the family. Not the officers trying to reach him. When he eventually resurfaced, he didn’t explain the disappearance and refused any further interview.

I remember sitting there, listening to the detective tell me this over the phone, feeling my hands go numb.

“My daughter is missing,” I said, “and the man who argued with her that same day disappears right after she does, and you can’t make him talk?”

The answer was the one I would hear in a hundred different forms over the next years: “Ma’am, without evidence of a crime…”

They checked hospitals. Nothing. They checked morgues and John/Jane Doe reports. Nothing. They watched their bank accounts: no withdrawals, no credit card usage, no paychecks cashed. My daughter, who wrote down every expense in a notebook, left not a single financial footprint after that rental tape.

Adults sometimes run away. They grab cash, buy a bus ticket, disappear into another city. It’s not common, but it happens.

It doesn’t usually happen without money, without IDs, without clothes. It doesn’t happen five minutes after you rent a movie you never even open.

The weeks stretched into months. The loft remained exactly as it was the day I found it. I kept paying the rent because I could not bear the thought of someone else moving into that space like nothing had happened. I told myself she might walk in one day, a little dazed, maybe hurt, maybe confused, and I wanted everything to be exactly where she left it.

Somewhere in those early months, the case shifted from “This will resolve soon” to “We have no idea what happened.” You don’t feel the moment it changes. There’s no phone call that says, “We’re out of leads now.” You just realize one day that you’re the only one still waking up every morning thinking, “Maybe today.”

Years passed.

The detectives changed. The file went from one desk to another. The case slid quietly into the cold case unit, which is exactly what it sounds like: a room full of stories that never found their ending.

Life did the awful thing life always does.

It went on.

I went to work. I paid bills. I answered questions from people who didn’t know what to say. I sat in offices listening to explanations about why I couldn’t close accounts or handle certain paperwork because, legally, my daughter was “missing,” not “dead.” To sign certain documents, you need a death certificate. To get a death certificate without a body, you need time, paperwork, and a level of acceptance I did not have.

There is a kind of grief where you cry and people hug you and bring food to your house. And there is another kind of grief where you sit in government offices with a folder in your lap, trying to convince strangers that your child is gone even though nobody can prove it.

Every November, around the date they disappeared, a few of us would meet near Pearl Street. Friends, neighbors, people who had known them. We lit candles, told stories, and walked the same blocks they used to walk. At first there were reporters. Over time, the crowd thinned. The city changed. New apartment towers went up around 76 Pearl. New restaurants opened. New people walked those streets with no idea two lives had stopped there one night without a sound.

In 2000, I got a call that made my heart slam against my ribs.

Rodriguez had been arrested.

Not for anything to do with my daughter or Michael, of course. It was credit card fraud, identity misuses, messy financial crimes. But the moment his name appeared in the news, people started whispering again. “See?” they said. “Look at the kind of man he is.” I remember thinking, finally, something. Something that shows what we all felt.

But crime is not math. You don’t get to add up bad behavior and say, “Therefore, he did this too.” The police looked again at his connection to the case. He was still suspicious. Still evasive. But there was still not a single physical piece of evidence tying him to the disappearance.

So nothing changed.

In 2007, ten years after that night, the cold case unit did a structured review. Procedures had improved. Technology had advanced. They cross-checked dental records and DNA against unidentified bodies from the Hudson, the East River, the Jersey shore. They went back decades. They widened the search more than the original team ever could.

Nothing matched.

They dug deeper into Rodriguez’s past and found things that made my skin crawl: a building bought with suspicious insurance money from a fire, another man who’d done business with him and then vanished under strange circumstances years earlier. Patterns. Not proof, but patterns.

I remember a detective sitting across from me, hands folded, saying quietly, “Ma’am, if I could follow my gut alone, I know where I’d go. But the law doesn’t work on gut.”

They walked me through their reconstruction of what might have happened. It wasn’t official. There was no report titled “This is what we think.” It was just experienced investigators, years later, trying to be honest with a mother who deserved something more than silence.

They said the most likely scenario was that whatever happened, happened in or near that building, in a narrow window of time, quietly enough that no one heard anything clearly and quickly enough that there was no chance for escape. They believed my daughter and Michael probably opened their door to someone they knew, or at least recognized. No forced entry. No signs of resistance. A short, controlled interaction. Maybe in the loft. Maybe on the stairs. Maybe just outside a door.

They told me that if something terrible happened outside, in the neighborhood, there would almost certainly be some trace — a 911 call, a random witness, an ER intake. New York is a loud city. Even accidents leave footprints.

Here, there was nothing.

They believed — though nobody would ever say it on official paper — that my daughter and Michael died that night, and that whoever was responsible knew the building well enough to move without being seen.

I listened, hands clenched in my lap, and thought of that staircase.

Sometimes I imagine it like a still frame from a movie. Camden halfway up, plastic bag of videotapes swinging from her hand. Michael in his long coat, turning toward her as she says something only he can hear. At the top, a man in shadow, one hand on the edge of a door, watching them climb.

Everything in motion. Everyone in character. Nothing obviously wrong.

And then, just before the next frame, something happens that rewrites everything.

I don’t know what that something is. Nobody does. That’s what eats at you. Not just the loss, but the gap where the truth should be. A story with the last chapter torn out.

Eventually, because life is practical even when your heart is not, paperwork had to be filed. “Missing, presumed dead” is the phrase. It sounds clinical, but for families like mine it’s a strange relief and a fresh wound at the same time. It lets you close accounts, transfer property, handle the things the world cares about. It does not close the part of you that still turns your head when you hear a familiar laugh in a crowd.

People sometimes ask me if I still hope she’s alive somewhere. They say it gently, like they’re afraid of the answer.

Logic says no. Logic looks at the money never touched, the passports never moved, the bodies never found, and accepts what the detectives accepted years ago.

But there is a thin, stubborn part of me — the part that packed her school lunches and waited in school parking lots and knew every mole on her face — that thinks of all the strange, unlikely things that happen in this world and whispers, “Maybe.”

Maybe she lost her memory and started over. Maybe she’s sitting in some other city, feeling the same hole I feel, not knowing why. Maybe a stranger will see her face, feel a jolt of recognition from a photo they once saw online, and make a phone call that finally gives us an answer.

I know how improbable that is.

I also know that love is not logical.

So here I am, all these years later, telling this story on the internet to people who never knew my daughter, who will scroll past her name in between cooking videos and vacation photos and memes.

Maybe you’ll remember just one thing:

A couple who did everything right. Paid their bills, stayed out of trouble, annoyed their landlord only enough to ask for heat in winter. Walked home one Friday night with a rented movie. Opened their front door. Climbed a staircase.

And vanished between one doorway and the next.

If you’ve read this far, tell me what you think.
Do you believe some truths just never come out?
If you were in my place, would you fight to keep hope alive, or would you force yourself to let go?

Comment honestly. And if you want, tell me your city or country — I’d like to know how far their story has traveled, even if they themselves never got the chance. 🕯️