“Where’s Mitchell?”
Liam flinched.
I saw it.
But I misunderstood it.
Mr. Thomas told us the police had been called. Her purse was gone. Her phone was off. Because she was eighteen, there was a chance she had left by choice.
I grabbed onto the detail I could understand.
Her purse was gone.
Her phone was off.
Mitchell was missing too.
So in my mind, the story was already written.
He had taken her.
The next morning, I found Mitchell’s mother, Natalie, in the school parking lot speaking with an officer.
I stormed toward her.
“Where did your son take my daughter?”
Natalie turned slowly. Her face was pale, but her voice was calm.
“I don’t know where they are.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“They love each other, Camila.”
I stepped closer. “Don’t you dare say that.”
Liam grabbed my arm. “Mom, please.”
Natalie looked at him with pity.
That only made me angrier.
“My daughter is gone,” I said. “And your family did this.”
For eleven months, I lived inside that sentence.
PART 2
The police searched the school, the woods, and the river.
Weeks later, they told us Livia had contacted them. She was safe. But because she was an adult, she did not have to reveal her location.
I refused to accept it.
In my mind, she had been manipulated. Taken. Turned against us.
After that night, Liam changed.
He stopped laughing. He locked his bedroom door whenever he was inside. If I knocked, he answered through the wood.
“Please, Mom. Just don’t come in.”
I thought it was grief.
So I respected it.
Around Christmas, John tried to say what I refused to hear.
“Camila, she was eighteen.”
I looked up from Livia’s empty stocking. “Don’t.”
“Maybe she left.”
“She would never do that to me.”
John looked exhausted.
“Maybe that sentence is part of the problem.”
By August, Liam left for college.
At his car, I tried to hug him.
He let me, but barely.
“Don’t disappear on me too,” I whispered.
His eyes filled. “I’m trying not to.”
A month later, I smelled smoke coming from under his bedroom door.
Liam was away. John was at work. I was upstairs alone when the smell reached me — sharp, burnt, wrong.
His door was locked.
I used a small screwdriver until the lock gave way, then pushed it open.
