Chapter 56 The Silence That Screamed

Chapter 56 The Silence That Screamed
POV: Zara

I typed the same four words for the fourth time in two days.

Please just answer me.

My thumb hovered over the send button so long the screen dimmed and went dark before I finally tapped it. The message went up next to three others just like it, all sitting there with that same flat, unanswered weight. Delivered. Not read. Not read. Not read.

Naomi was alive. The police had found her the morning after that second photo came through, untied, unhurt on the outside, sitting on the curb two streets over from the address she'd given Eli, like whoever took her had simply let her go once they'd made their point. Jade turned up an hour later in the same condition, two blocks the other direction.

Alive. Safe. Home.

And completely gone from me anyway.

I sat on the edge of my bed staring at my phone like it might do something different if I just waited long enough. It didn't. The little checkmarks stayed gray and silent, same as they had since the hospital, since I'd hugged Naomi so hard in that waiting room she'd had to remind me to breathe, since she'd whispered I'm okay, I promise, just give me some space against my shoulder like it was the only thing she had left to give.

I'd given her the space. Two whole days of it. It was starting to feel less like space and more like a door slowly closing with me on the wrong side of it.

A fight I could've handled. Naomi yelling, Naomi crying, Naomi listing every single thing I'd done wrong since the day Eli walked into that kitchen, I could've taken all of it and fought my way back to her the way we always did, loud and messy and honest. This was different. This silence had no shape to grab onto. I didn't know what I was even supposed to be sorry for anymore, the almost-kiss or the video or the fact that some stranger had used her as a warning meant for me.

My phone buzzed and I lunged for it so fast I nearly knocked my lamp off the nightstand.

Not Naomi.

Mom, asking if I wanted dinner. I typed not hungry and set the phone face-down on my comforter like that might stop me from checking it every ninety seconds.

It didn't.

By the third hour of staring at nothing, I gave up waiting for a text and grabbed my shoes instead. If she wouldn't answer me, I'd go answer myself. Naomi's house was eight minutes away on foot, a walk I'd done a thousand times since fourth grade, one I could do with my eyes shut.

I knocked. Waited. Knocked again.

It was Eli's dad who opened the door, not Naomi, not Eli, and the look on his face when he saw me standing there made my stomach drop before he even said a word.

"She's not really seeing anyone right now, Zara," he said, gentle but final, the kind of tone adults use when they've already decided the conversation is over. "Give her a little more time, okay?"

"Can I just" I started, and he was already shaking his head, already easing the door shut another few inches.

"She asked me to say that to anyone who came by," he said. "I'm sorry, sweetheart."

The door clicked shut.

I stood on that porch for a long minute, the same porch where Eli's hand had found my jaw a lifetime ago, the same porch where everything good and everything terrible had both started, and I felt something in my chest crack a little wider.

Anyone who came by. Not just me. Anyone.

That should've made it hurt less. It didn't. It made it worse, somehow, knowing this wasn't really about me at all, knowing my best friend had built a wall so high not even her own brother's girl could get a foot inside it.

I walked home slower than I'd walked there, kicking at nothing, replaying every version of what I could've done differently. Maybe if I'd told her about the roof the very first night. Maybe if I'd never let Eli leave that tea outside my door. Maybe if I'd just stayed exactly the invisible girl I'd always been, none of this would have touched her at all.

My phone buzzed again halfway down her street.

I yanked it out so fast I almost dropped it in the grass.

Naomi Maddox.

My heart did something complicated and painful, hope and dread tangled together so tight I couldn't tell which one was winning. I opened the message with my thumb shaking.

It wasn't words.

It was a photo. Grainy, dim, clearly taken from inside whatever room they'd kept her in, the kind of picture that made my skin go cold before I even understood what I was looking at.

A folded piece of paper, sitting on a table, my name written across the front of it in handwriting I almost recognized but couldn't quite place.

Under the photo, a single line of text from Naomi's number, but the second I read it I knew, somewhere deep and sick in my stomach, that it hadn't been Naomi who typed it at all.

She doesn't know I have her phone yet. Come alone or she finds out what really happened the night her dad left. I know that secret too.