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.

There was no fire, only a scorched power strip beside his desk. I yanked the cord from the wall.

Then I saw the photo.

The prom picture.

Livia smiling beside Liam, already hiding a secret.

My legs weakened, and I sank onto his yellow beanbag chair.

Something underneath me felt strange.

Too soft in one spot.

Too hard in another.

I flipped it over.

A long seam ran across the bottom, stitched with bright red thread.

Liam had never known how to sew.

But Livia had.