Chapter 3

I took a few deep breaths, forcing the panic back down. "What do I do now?"

The detective thought for a moment, then pulled a small drawer open and handed me a tiny object.

"First, you need to get out of that house. Go stay somewhere else. And take this."

I took it. It was a sleek, black digital voice recorder. It was tiny, barely the size of a thumb drive.

"This is a high-grade recorder. The battery lasts for days. Keep it on you at all times, and keep it recording. If he says anything strange or does anything out of the ordinary, we need it on record. Right now, we don't have probable cause to make an arrest."

I clenched the recorder in my fist, its cold metal casing biting into my palm.

"If anything feels wrong, call me immediately," he said, handing me a business card. "Anytime. Day or night."

I looked at the card. *Detective Miller, East Precinct.*

"Detective Miller," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "Will staying at a hotel be enough? What if he finds me?"

"Go stay with your mother. Don't tell him the address. If he texts you, just say you missed her and wanted to spend some quality mother-daughter time. Don't trigger his suspicion, and absolutely do not let him know you're onto him. Act completely normal. Can you do that?"

I nodded, slipping the card and the recorder into my purse.

"One more thing," Detective Miller added, his eyes locked onto mine. "Do not let him get you alone in a car, and under no circumstances do you agree to leave the country with him."

Cold dread washed over me. "Leave the country?"

"Before she vanished, Mrs. Jenkins mentioned that her 'son' kept urging her to move abroad with him. He kept telling her he had bought a beautiful estate in Europe and wanted her to live out her days in luxury. She laughed it off at the time. But now..."

He didn't finish the sentence, but he didn't need to.

By the time I stepped out of the police precinct, the sky was pitch black.

The November wind was freezing. I wrapped my coat tightly around myself, my mind spinning at a million miles an hour.

Why make people disappear?

Where did they go?

Where were Mrs. Jenkins and her son right now?

Were they even alive?

My hand remained buried in my pocket, gripping the recorder so hard my knuckles turned white.

I began to dissect every single detail of the last ten years.

Julian and I got married in 2014.

He was twenty-eight back then, working as a low-level sales rep for an import-export company. He was incredibly frail—nearly six feet tall but barely weighing 130 pounds. He looked like a gust of wind could blow him over.

His stomach issues were so severe that we spent half our weekends in the ER. He couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without gasping for air. The doctors told us it was a congenital weakness.

Then, just one year into our marriage, he told me he had to relocate abroad.

He claimed his company offered him a transfer to their overseas branch. The pay was five times his current salary.

I remember how excited he was when we talked about it. He said we could finally buy a house, start a family, and live comfortably.

I was completely against it. We had only been married for a year, his health was terrible, and the thought of him being alone across the world terrified me.

But he was set on it. He insisted it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. After weeks of fighting, he won.

And so began the agonizing decade of long-distance.

We communicated mostly through Snapchat and quick text messages. We rarely did phone calls. He always claimed he was working grueling overtime, or that the time difference made it too difficult.

Whenever I begged to FaceTime, he always had an excuse. His camera was broken, his internet was too slow, or his roommates were already asleep in their shared dorm.

I was naive. I believed him. I thought he was just sacrificing everything and living in harsh conditions to build a future for us.

But there were times when he would completely drop off the grid.

The longest stretch was five whole days of radio silence.

I sent dozens of snaps, called his number repeatedly, but got absolutely nothing.

I was on the verge of buying a plane ticket to go search for him when he finally texted back, claiming his project was on a brutal deadline and he had been working eighty-hour shifts without a second to look at his phone.

I believed him back then.

But now? A normal human being doesn't look at their phone for five days?

***

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