A waitress with tired eyes talking about “that mess at the Gallagher farm” and “poor Miguel” and “that Gentry girl better get herself right with the Lord.”
Nobody says my name.
They never do, until it’s too late.
The little TV over the counter plays the news with the sound off, captions scrolling. A familiar face flashes up—Sheriff JackBrady. The picture is from some official headshot, but I remember him better with mud on his boots and a gun in his hand, shouting orders into the trees.
He’s closer than I’d like.
They all are.
According to the scroll, there’s a “multi-agency task force” now. State police. Feds. Regional whatever. Lots of men who think acronyms make them big.
All very flattering.
I stir sugar into my coffee and think about Tallulah.
She’s not on the news. Of course she’s not. They never mention by name the girls they failed to protect the first time.
But she’s gone.
That much is clear from the gossip—Cotton’s place “cleared out,” the “little hacker girl” nowhere to be seen, rumors that she’d gone “up north” or “back to that city” or “with her family.”
They don’t know where she is.
Neither do I.
That annoys me more than it should.
I had a nice pattern going. Apartment. Farm. Her online spaces. I liked the rhythm of it—the way she jumped when I tapped the cage, the way her friends circled her like anxious birds.
Now she’s off the board.
For the moment.
But there’s one piece still pinned to the corkboard in my head. One fixed point in the future.
She doesn’t know I saw it. She posted it once, months ago, too proud of the invitation not to share. The date. The place. The way she’d writtenso fun!!!with three exclamation marks, like it was some kind of coronation.
She tried to scrub it after I came back. Deleted the post. Changed the settings. Locked things down.
But you can’t unring a bell.
You can’t undo something once I’ve seen it.
I watch Sheriff Brady’s mouth move on the TV without sound and imagine what he’d say if he knew what I know. If he understood that all this flailing around in the dark is just noise before the real show starts.
They can move her. Hide her. Wrap her in Kevlar and Irish muscle and cameras.
But she’ll be there, at that place, on that date.
I finish my coffee, leave a decent tip—no one remembers a good tipper as anything other than “nice”—and step back out into the cold.
The sky is clear tonight, the stars sharp and the air thin in my lungs.
She’s out there somewhere, tucked away in some safe little box, thinking this is the part where she catches her breath. Where the worst is over.
It isn’t. The farm was just a reminder. A nudge.
