Chapter 5 His Empty Room

I sat there long after Jane had gone, staring at the clipping until the letters of my father's name stopped looking like a name at all, just shapes, just ink.

"Daniel Harper," I whispered, and it sounded wrong in my own mouth, like a word I'd forgotten how to pronounce. I'd said it a thousand times growing up. Dad. Not this. Not a headline.

If he was gone, actually gone, who had buried him. Why had the papers called him missing instead. And how did Jane, a stranger I'd known for exactly one train ride, know more about my own father than I did.

I didn't go to school. I couldn't have explained algebra to myself in that moment, let alone sat through it.

The walk home felt like watching my life through glass. A group of girls laughed outside the corner shop over something on someone's phone. A dad crouched down to zip his daughter's coat at the crossing. A dog barked twice at nothing and someone told it to hush. All of it kept moving, ordinary and easy, while I walked through the middle of it feeling like the only thing standing still.

"Riley."

Marcus's voice, and then Marcus himself, jogging up the pavement toward me with his backpack half falling off one shoulder. "I've been looking everywhere. You didn't answer any of my texts."

"Sorry. Phone died."

"You weren't in first period." He stopped in front of me, studying my face in that way he had, like he was reading something I hadn't said out loud yet. "Have you been crying?"

"No." The lie came fast, too fast.

"Riley."

"I'm just tired, Marcus. I didn't sleep well."

He didn't buy it, I could tell, but he also knew better than to push when I got like this, jaw tight, eyes somewhere else. "Skip with me," he said instead. "We'll get food. You clearly need it."

For one second I almost said yes. I almost opened my mouth and let the whole thing spill out, the bag, the photographs, Jane, the note, my father's name printed under a headline that made my chest cave in.

No police. No lies. I remembered.

"I can't," I said. "I have to get home. Mum needs me."

"Okay." He didn't look convinced, not even close, but he let me go, watching me the whole way down the street with an expression I didn't have the energy to decode. I didn't know it then, but that look meant he'd already decided something.

The house was quiet when I let myself in. Mum was resting upstairs, curtains drawn, the kind of rest that came easier now that her medication was back on schedule. I stood in the hallway for a long moment, staring down the corridor toward a door I hadn't opened properly in years.

Dad's study.

The handle stuck the way it always had, swollen wood that never quite fit its frame anymore, and when it finally gave, dust rolled out into the hallway like something disturbed from sleep. Mum never could bear to clean this room after he vanished. She'd just closed the door and left it, a museum to a man who wasn't supposed to still be part of our lives, and yet somehow was, sitting in every untouched surface.

I stepped inside.

I hadn't crossed that doorway since I was eleven.

Old files stacked along one wall. Bills, long overdue and irrelevant now. Letters bundled with rubber bands gone brittle with age. Family photographs curling at the edges in frames that hadn't been dusted in half a decade. It all looked ordinary, painfully ordinary, exactly what you'd expect from a man who used to run a small business and loved his family and then simply disappeared one day without a word.

Too ordinary.

Then I noticed the shelf.

Clean rectangular marks pressed into the dust, gaps where boxes had clearly sat for years and had recently, very recently, been lifted away. The dust around those gaps looked disturbed, smudged, like fingers had dragged through it not long ago.

Someone had already been in this room.

My stomach turned over slowly. Someone had gotten here before me. Taken what they needed. Left the rest for me to find, or maybe just hadn't bothered clearing everything, hadn't thought I'd come looking at all.

I searched the desk next, drawer by drawer, until my fingers closed around something small and cold. An old key, unlabeled. A train ticket, faded past reading the date. And beneath both, an envelope.

My Girls.

That was all it said. No names, just those two words in my father's careful handwriting, a phrase Mum used to say he called us both when he was in a soft mood.

The seal looked wrong. Repaired, not original, a thin line of glue holding paper that had clearly been opened once and closed again by someone trying not to leave a trace.

I opened it anyway.

If you're reading this, something has happened that I couldn't stop.

I hope one day you'll understand why I left. He talked about protecting us. About choices he'd made that he couldn't undo. He apologized, over and over, the same sentiment dressed in different words each time, but never once did he say what he was protecting us from, or who he was protecting us against.

The final page ended mid-sentence. Torn, deliberately, the ragged edge where the rest of it should have continued.

Someone had removed it on purpose.

Which meant someone hadn't wanted me, or Mum, or anyone, to read whatever came next.

And that meant Jane hadn't sent me here to search blindly. She'd sent me here because she already knew this letter existed. She knew, or someone had told her, exactly what this room held before I ever stepped inside it.

The front gate clicked shut outside.

I froze, letter still in hand, every nerve in my body going tight at once. Footsteps on the path. Not Mum's slow, careful steps. Not Marcus's familiar stride.

Someone else.

I crept to the window and eased the curtain back just enough to see.

A boy, maybe my age, walking away from our house with his hands shoved into his pockets, his head down like he didn't want to be recognized. He glanced back once, just once, and for a single frozen second our eyes met across the front garden.

Then he turned the corner and was gone.

My eyes dropped to what he'd been carrying, slung casually over one shoulder like it belonged to him.

A purple backpack.