Work. That meant planning. Boxes, arrangements, goodbyes made without me. The text hadn’t been a breakdown. It had been the final piece of something already in motion.
I called Tom. Still off. His friends knew little. One mentioned work “somewhere quieter.” Another said Tom seemed distracted for weeks.
Then I called his father. Not because I wanted to. Because Danny deserved to know.
“What?” Danny answered.
“Tom is gone, Dan.”
Silence. Then: “This is your parenting, Samantha. You let him get too attached.”
Another said Tom seemed distracted for weeks.
I said nothing. The longer the silence stretched, the more Danny’s tone changed.
“When did you last talk to him?” he asked.
“Last afternoon.”
“Send me the letter,” Danny demanded, and that was the first real thing I’d heard in his voice during the entire conversation. Not goodness, but the understanding that something had actually gone wrong.
I followed every lead I had that day while Danny checked on his end. A gas station outside of town. A hiring board at a garden center. A diner off the highway. None of it landed.
By evening, I was no longer searching with hope so much as refusing to stop, because stopping meant sitting still with what the letter had done to me.
“When did you last talk to him?”
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