Bride (Ali Hazelwood) by Ali Hazelwood

            “Yes, often, but she always warns me. Plus, she’s an investigative reporter for The Herald, and did not take days off.” According to their system. Which I hacked.

            “Maybe she was out of vacation days and still wanted to, I dunno, drive to Las Vegas to see her aunt. Just a misunderstanding.”

            “We had plans to meet, and she’s an orphan with no family or friends who doesn’t own a car. According to her banking portal, to which she gave me access”—kind of—“no cash withdrawals or online payments were processed. But maybe you’re correct, and she’s bouncing to Las Vegas on her pogo stick?”

            “No need to get testy, honey. We all want to think that we’re important to the people who are important to us. But sometimes, our best friend is someone else’s best friend.”

            I closed my eyes to roll them behind my lids.

            “Did you two maybe have a fight?” the officer asked.

            I crossed my arms on my chest and sucked my cheeks in. “That’s not the point—”

            “Ha.”

            “Okay.” I frowned. “Let’s say Serena secretly hates me. She still wouldn’t leave her cat, would she?”

            He paused. Then, for the first time, he nodded and picked up a notepad. I felt a spark of hope. “Cat’s name?”

            “She hasn’t gotten around to naming him yet, though last we spoke she’d narrowed it down between Maximilien Robespierre and—”

            “How long has she had this cat?”

            “A few days? She still wouldn’t let the little asshole starve,” I hurried to add, but the officer had already dropped his pen. And even though I went back to the station three times that week, and eventually managed to get a missing person report filed, no one did anything to find Serena. The hazard, I guess, of being alone in the world: no one to care that she was safe, and healthy, and alive. No one but me, and I didn’t count. I shouldn’t have been surprised, and I wasn’t. But apparently I still had the capacity to feel hurt.

            Because no one cared whether I was safe, or healthy, or alive. No one but Serena. The sister of my heart, if not of my blood. And even though I’d been plenty alone, I’d never felt so lonely as after she was gone.

            I wished I could cry. I wished for lacrimal ducts to let out this horrible terror that she’d left forever, that she’d been taken, that she was in pain, that it was my fault and I’d driven her away with our last conversation. Unfortunately, biology was not on my side. So I worked through my feelings by going to her place and taking care of her damn fucking cat, who showed his gratitude by scratching me every single day.

            And, of course, by looking for her where I shouldn’t have.

            I had the keys, after all. Because the key to everything is but a line of code. I was able to rifle through her bank statements, IP addresses, cell phone locations. Herald emails, metadata, app usage. Serena was a journalist, one who wrote about delicate financial stuff, and the most likely option was that she’d gotten embroiled in something fishy while working on a story, but I wasn’t going to exclude other possibilities. So I went through everything, and found . . . nothing.

            Absolutely nothing.

            Serena’s poof had been quite literal. But one cannot move in the world without leaving digital traces, which could only mean one thing. One terrible, blood-curdling thing that I couldn’t even put into words in the privacy of my own head.

            And that’s when I did it: I kneeled in front of Serena’s damn fucking cat. He was playing like he always did after dinner, pawing at a crumpled receipt in a corner of the living room, but managed to squeeze a couple of hisses into his busy schedule just for me. “Listen.” I swallowed. Rubbed my hand on my chest and then even slapped it, trying to dull the ache. “I know you only knew her for a few days, but I really, really . . .” I scrunched my eyes shut. Oh fuck, this was hard. “I don’t know how it happened, but I think that Serena might be . . .”

            I opened my eyes, because I owed it to this asshole cat to look at him. And that’s when I got a good view of it.

            The receipt, which wasn’t a balled-up receipt at all. It was a piece of paper torn from a journal, or perhaps a notebook, or—no. A planner. Serena’s incredibly outdated planner.