The Day After I Go Missing

Who did this

The air is cold, and it stings the inside of her nose every time she breathes. She’s been breathing shallowly for hours—partly because of fear, partly because the stale air in the back of the van tastes like dust and rusted metal. The van has stopped moving now, and she can hear footsteps crunching outside. Lydia’s wrists burn where the restraints rub. Her lips are cracked. Her whole body feels heavy, like her soul is sinking deeper into itself.

When she first woke up back here, gagged and blindfolded, she thought this was all some twisted mistake. That someone would realize they grabbed the wrong girl. That Marcus would be calling her name or the cops would storm in like in the movies. But hours later, all that hope has bled out. It’s replaced with a grim, hollow awareness: this is deliberate. Someone wanted her gone.

She thinks about the day before. How normal it seemed. She made coffee. She sent out a couple job applications she knew wouldn’t be answered. She texted Marcus, who gave her a vague, distant reply. There were signs she missed—the way people at the store avoided eye contact, the way neighbors pulled back curtains when she walked by. It clicks now, too late. There was a shift in how the world looked at her in those last weeks. Like they all knew something she didn’t.

She doesn’t know if Marcus betrayed her, or if he’s just weak, but she knows someone close gave her up. Her chest aches worse than the restraints because of that thought.

The van door screeches open. The sudden burst of cold air makes her gasp. She’s dragged out, boots scraping gravel. The blindfold slips just enough for her to catch a blurred glimpse of a dark treeline and a sky hanging low with clouds. It smells like wet earth and pine. Somewhere an owl hoots. She wants to live. The want crashes over her so sharply she almost sobs from it.

They walk her—or drag her, really—into the trees. She stumbles, knees smashing on roots and stones. Every nerve screams for her to fight, to run, but the fear is a paralytic in her veins. Her mind races instead. She thinks:

If I scream, will someone hear me?

If I beg, will they stop?

If I survive this, I’ll never take another sunrise for granted.

Then another voice in her head: There’s no surviving this. Not for you.

The men talk low and fast. She doesn’t know how many there are—two? three?—but one voice stands out. The same cold voice from earlier. He says, “Debt’s cleared after this. Leave her where they’ll find enough to be afraid.”

Fear. Not ransom. Not a mistake. A warning. Lydia realizes she’s not a person to them. She’s a message. The thought is like being erased from the world while still breathing.

They stop in a clearing. She’s forced to her knees. Her blindfold is ripped off, and the night spins into focus. Moonlight paints the trees silver and black. Her breath fogs in the air. One man steps closer, a silhouette more than a face.

Her mind floods with images—not of her captors, but of her life:

Her mom’s laugh over burnt pancakes.

The first time she and Marcus kissed under a flickering streetlight.

The stray cat she fed scraps to outside her apartment.

The poem she wrote on a napkin last week, about love that never loved her back.

She wishes she’d told someone she loved them one more time. Wishes she’d fought harder for herself. Wished she hadn’t been so tired all the time. She wishes someone would come crashing through the trees right now yelling her name.

The man with the cold voice crouches down, eyes catching the moonlight. There’s no malice there—just emptiness, like he’s done this before and will again. “It won’t take long,” he says.

Lydia’s tears are hot against the cold night air. She doesn’t beg. Not because she’s brave, but because some part of her refuses to give them that. She closes her eyes. She thinks of a sunrise—soft pink and gold, the kind that makes you believe the world could be good. She clings to that, even as everything else unravels.

The last thing she hears is the crunch of boots on leaves as someone steps closer, and a rush of wings overhead—owls, or maybe just the wind stirring the branches. For an instant she imagines the flying monkeys from her nightmares, circling above, shrieking like they did in her head all those lonely nights. Maybe they’ve come for her at last. Maybe they were always coming.

There’s a sharpness against her skin. A moment of panic, of white-hot pain. And then—

Everything goes still.

---

Later, investigators will find traces: disturbed leaves, a piece of the blindfold caught on a branch, that folded receipt under her doormat with the word PAID. They’ll never find her alive. Maybe they won’t even find her at all.

But in her last moments, Lydia wasn’t just a victim. She was a storm of memories and love and terror and defiance. The world tried to make her into a warning, a debt paid off, a ghost. And maybe it succeeded. But she still felt. Right up until the darkness closed in, she lived.