Chapter 54 The Door She Couldn't Open

Chapter 54 The Door She Couldn't Open
POV: Zara

My phone rang four times before it went to voicemail.

I hit the green button again. Same thing. Eli's name on my screen, no answer, just his voicemail telling me to leave a message after the beep.

I didn't leave one. I just hung up and called again.

"Pick up," I whispered, pacing my room in a circle that didn't go anywhere. "Pick up, pick up, pick up."

Nothing.

The last text Naomi sent me was forty minutes old. I figured out who's behind this. After that, silence. Not even the three little dots that meant she was typing. Just nothing, like she'd dropped off the face of the earth in the middle of a sentence.

I texted Eli instead. Did you find her? Is Naomi okay? Eli, answer me.

The message sat there with one gray checkmark. Not delivered. Not read. Just stuck, the same way my stomach felt stuck, twisted up tight and refusing to settle.

Something was wrong. I could feel it the way you feel a storm coming before the sky even changes color, a pressure behind my ribs that wouldn't let me sit still.

A knock on my door made me jump so hard I almost dropped my phone.

"Zara?" Mom's voice, soft through the wood. "You okay in there, baby?"

I wiped my face even though I hadn't cried yet, like my body was already getting ready for it. "I'm fine."

There was a pause. The kind of pause that meant she didn't believe me but wasn't going to fight about it.

"Okay," she said. Just that. Okay.

I heard her footsteps go down the hall, not toward her room, but toward the kitchen. A few minutes later I heard them come back, slower this time, like she was carrying something.

She didn't knock again. She just set something down outside my door and walked away.

I waited until I couldn't hear her anymore before I opened it.

A plate sat on the floor. My favorite, the lemon pepper chicken and rice she only made when something in the house felt heavy, when words weren't going to fix whatever was wrong, so she fixed it with food instead. A glass of sweet tea right next to it, the ice already starting to melt.

She didn't ask me what was wrong. She didn't make me explain the bonfire, or Naomi, or the video, or any of it. She just made the thing that made me feel safe when I was seven years old and left it outside my door like a peace offering to a kid who couldn't talk yet.

I picked it up and brought it back inside. I sat on my bed with the plate in my lap, and I ate, slow, mechanical, barely tasting it.

And then, somewhere between one bite and the next, it hit me.

Naomi's voice on the phone earlier. Shaky. Scared. I'm not safe where I am. The address she gave Eli, the one he didn't recognize. The line going dead right in the middle of her telling him whose house it was.

My best friend was somewhere she shouldn't be, with someone dangerous enough that she couldn't even finish a sentence about it, and I was sitting in my room eating chicken and rice like everything was fine.

The fork slipped out of my hand. It hit the plate with a clatter, and I didn't even pick it back up.

I thought about the roof. The night Eli found me crying over my dad's letter and just sat there in the dark, not fixing anything, not saying it would be okay, just staying. I hadn't cried like that since. Not when the video went up. Not when Naomi looked at me in homeroom like I was a stranger. Not even when Jade read those comments out loud in front of the whole bonfire crowd.

I'd held it together through all of it. Some stubborn, mean little part of me had decided crying was the same thing as losing, and I didn't lose.

But now, alone, with cold chicken in my lap and my best friend's scared voice replaying in my head, the wall I'd been holding up just gave out.

I cried the way you cry when you're finally somewhere safe enough to do it. Quiet at first, then not quiet at all, my shoulders shaking, the plate sliding off my knees and onto the comforter, sweet tea spilling and soaking into the fabric, and I didn't even care.

I cried for Naomi, wherever she was. I cried for Eli, who I couldn't reach. I cried for the version of this summer I thought I was going to have, the easy one, the one without cameras and comment sections and a porch full of people laughing at my expense.

I don't know how long it lasted. Long enough that my throat felt raw and my eyes felt swollen and the sun outside my window had dropped low enough to turn everything orange.

My phone buzzed on the bed beside me.

I grabbed it so fast I almost threw it across the room.

Not Eli. Not Naomi.

A number I didn't recognize. No name. Just ten digits and a message underneath them, three words long.

I know everything.

My whole body went cold.

Before I could even process it, before I could decide if I should show my mom or call the police or throw my phone into the wall, a second message landed right under the first one.

Tell Eli to stop looking. Or the next video won't be about a kiss.

I stared at the screen until the words blurred. My hands were shaking so hard I could barely hold the phone steady enough to read it again, just to make sure I hadn't imagined it.

Then a photo loaded underneath the texts.

It took a second to make sense of what I was looking at. A house. A dark window. And through that window, barely visible, a girl tied to a chair with tape across her mouth, her eyes wide and terrified, staring straight at whoever was holding the camera.

Naomi.