Chapter 5

The house was full of people by the time Sophie got there.

Two police officers stood with her parents in the living room, notebooks out, talking in the kind of calm voices that made her angry just from listening to them. Her mother sat on the edge of the couch with her hands pressed together in her lap, like she was holding herself in one piece. Her father stood behind her, arms crossed, jaw tight.

"Most likely a voluntary departure," one of the officers said. "Teenagers run off. Especially after a family conflict. We'll widen the search if she doesn't turn up in the next day or two."

"She's not most teenagers," Sophie said.

Everyone turned toward her.

"She has a chronic illness. She can't just disappear for hours without her medication and be fine." Sophie's voice cracked. "You keep saying 'voluntary,' like she packed a bag for a road trip. She needs a doctor. This isn't some phase she's going through."

"We're aware of her medical history, miss," the officer said, gentle in a way that felt more dismissive than kind. "We're taking it into account. I promise you, we're not treating this lightly."

Sophie didn't believe him. Nobody in that room seemed to understand what going too long without her medication could do to Clara's body. Nobody except Sophie, and maybe her parents, and none of them were saying it loud enough.

She left before she said something she couldn't take back and went upstairs, past her mother's hand reaching for her arm, past her father's voice telling her this wasn't the time. She'd heard that sentence enough times to know exactly how much weight it carried. None.

Clara's door was open. Someone had already gone through the room, police, probably, or her mother, frantic and searching for some clue about where her daughter might have gone. Sophie stepped inside and stopped in the doorway.

The room was too neat.

She knew this room. She'd grown up walking past it, borrowing clothes from the pile on the chair, tripping over shoes left wherever Clara had kicked them off. Clara left socks on the floor. Clara's desk stayed buried under textbooks and half-finished sketches for weeks at a time. This wasn't that. The bed was made with square corners. The desk was bare except for a stack of books lined up like a display. Even Clara's shoes by the closet were paired off and facing the same direction, heels against the wall.

Someone had cleaned this room recently.

Sophie's pulse picked up as she moved further inside, running her hand along the underside of the mattress, then crouching to check beneath the bed. Nothing but dust and an old shoebox of magazines. She went through the desk's next drawers that had clearly been opened already, papers shifted slightly out of place, the kind of disturbance you only notice if you've spent your whole life looking at the same room.

She didn't know what she was looking for. She just knew the police wouldn't find it, because they didn't know Clara the way Sophie did.

She checked the bedside table last. The top drawer held pens, a phone charger, and a half-empty pack of gum. Nothing. The second drawer was almost empty: a few old hair ties and a receipt. Nothing there either. Sophie was about to give up and try somewhere else when her fingers brushed against something taped to the underside of the bottom drawer, tucked where nobody would find it unless they pulled the drawer all the way out and turned it over.

She pulled it free.

An old photograph, curled slightly at the corners, tape residue still stuck to the back.

Sophie and Clara as kids, six and eight, maybe standing close together near a wrecked car. Their parents stood behind them in the background, blurred, caught mid-motion like the photographer hadn't waited for anyone to be ready. Beside young Sophie stood another child. A boy, from the shape of him, though it was hard to say for sure.

His face had been scratched out. Not torn away. Scratched, over and over, hard enough to dig through the paper, until there was nothing left but a pale, ragged hole where a face should have been.

Sophie turned it over.

Handwriting covered the back—Clara's, rushed, pressed so hard into the paper it had almost torn through.

ASK NOAH. NOT DAD.

Sophie went still.

Noah.

Of course it was Noah.

She hadn't heard that name spoken out loud in months. He used to warn her about Ethan, over and over, back before any of this happened, back when Sophie still thought Ethan was the best thing that had ever picked her out of a crowd. Noah never explained himself. He just kept saying Ethan wasn't who Sophie thought he was, like he knew something she didn't and had decided she wasn't smart enough to be told directly.

She'd ignored him every time. She'd resented him for it, too, the way he always looked at her like she was missing something obvious.

She'd hated him for that. Quietly, for a long time.

And now Clara, missing, silent, and gone too long without her medication, had hidden a photograph in the one place nobody would think to look, telling Sophie to go find him.

"Sophie."

She flinched and closed her fist around the photograph before she'd even turned around. Her father stood in the doorway.

He wasn't looking at her face. He was looking at her hand.

"What is that?"

"Nothing." The word came out too fast.

"Sophie." His voice had changed. Sharper than she'd ever heard it. "What did you find?"

"Something of Clara's."

"Show me."

She didn't move. She kept the photograph pressed against her chest, the back of it hidden, the boy with no face turned away from him.

"Where did you get that?" He crossed the room in three quick steps, hand already reaching. "Give it to me, Sophie."

"No."

"Sophie…"

"Why do you want it so badly?" She stepped back until her legs hit the edge of Clara's bed. "It's an old picture. Why does it matter this much to you?"

For a moment, something in his expression changed. He looked like he was trying to decide what to say.

"You cannot involve Noah in this," he said.

Sophie stared at him. "What?"

"Whatever you think you found in here. Whatever this is." His voice dropped low, urgent, almost pleading. "You leave him alone. This has nothing to do with him."

"Why?" Her heart was pounding hard enough that she could feel it in her throat. "Why does it have anything to do with him at all? Dad… why are you scared right now?"

He didn't answer.

Downstairs, her mother's voice called his name, sharp with something close to panic. He glanced toward the hallway, then back at Sophie, like he wanted to say something else and had run out of time to say it. Then he turned and left without another word.

Sophie let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.

She looked down at the photograph again, turning it over once more, away from the door.

ASK NOAH. NOT DAD.

And underneath it, smaller, dug even harder into the paper than the rest, were words she hadn't noticed the first time.

DON'T LET HIM SEE THIS.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside.

Not her mother's, nor her father's either; they already went down the stairs a moment ago.

Slower. Closer.

Sophie stood frozen with the photograph clutched in her hand and didn't move.