The Vanishing Children

In the heart of the American West, some children don't find homes. They simply vanish. Millbrook, Kansas, 1884. For telegraph operator Sarah Chen, life is a matter of precision. The crisp clicks of her telegraph key and the meticulous entries in her logbooks form a bulwark against a town that has never fully accepted her. But the rigid order of her world is shattered when the monthly Orphan Train arrives with one child missing from the manifest—a boy who exists on paper but not on the platform . The official explanation is a sudden illness, a clerical error easily dismissed . But Sarah's trained eyes see past the lies. Her search for a single, phantom child pulls her into the town's dark underbelly, where she uncovers a horrifying conspiracy shielded by Christian charity. Millbrook's most powerful citizens—a pious clergyman, a respected judge, and a wealthy widow—are not saving children; they are selling them. Using her unique access to the town's secrets, Sarah deciphers a hidden language of commerce in the telegraph wires—a network that trades children like "premium merchandise" and sets prices for "sturdy boys" and "fair-haired girls" . The system is vast, its corruption reaching the highest levels of power, and its methods are a chilling perversion of history itself. Now, the architects of this monstrous enterprise know she is watching. They've marked her for a "tragic accident," a problem to be permanently solved . As a lone woman hunted by the very men who control the law, Sarah must trust a small band of unlikely allies and race against time to expose the truth before the next train arrives—and before she becomes the next soul to vanish without a trace.