By the time we reached my building, the streetlamps burned low, casting long pools of gold across the wet pavement.
My apartment greeted us in soft familiarity, a space small but lived-in, its walls lined with precarious towers of books and half-filled mugs of forgotten tea. A lavender candle flickered faintly on the coffee table, perfuming the air with the subtle sweetness of calm and memory. We dropped onto the couch in a tangle of limbs and laughter, the kind of exaggerated exhaustion only university students and fictional heroines could perfect.
The opening credits had barely begun when Gwen’s phone buzzed. She glanced down, her smile faltering. Then she froze.
“It’s from Zayn,” she said quietly.
Aster sat up immediately. “Tell me he found something.”
Gwen nodded, her eyes scanning the screen. “He sent a file. Looks detailed.”
Something tightened low in my stomach, a strange mix of unease and anticipation coiling together until I couldn’t tell one from the other. Gwen opened the attachment, the pale glow of her phone washing softly across her face as her eyes moved over the screen.
“Okay,” she said finally, her tone shifting. “Here’s what we’ve got.”
She paused, her tone shifting, curiosity threading through each word.
“Name: Hayden Everett Stone. Born in Connecticut. Birthday, February second. Which
means…he’s an Aquarius. Naturally cursed. Undergraduate at Princeton. Master’s and PhD at Oxford. Taught at Cambridge for a while. Then transferred here six months ago. Before that, a short-term position at some private institute in Boston. Everything polished. Perfectly arranged. Too much so.”
Aster arched a brow. “So he’s a genius wanderer. Got it.”
Gwen scrolled further, her expression tightening. “Except…that’s where it stops.”
I leaned forward. “Stops how?”
“I mean, there’s nothing else,” she said, the edge in her voice sharpening with disbelief. “No personal data. No social media accounts. No mention of family anywhere. No photos apart from his faculty portrait. And here, Zayn left a note. Look.”
She turned the phone toward us. The glow cast faint halos across our faces as she read.
‘There’s a two-year gap between his last documented position and his arrival at the university. No trace of digital activity during that time. No forwarding address. No publications.No conference appearances. No lectures. Nothing. It’s as if he ceased to exist.’
A shiver moved down my spine, subtle but certain. Gwen’s thumb hovered over the next line.
‘That kind of silence doesn’t happen by accident. Either he erased it himself, or someone erased it for him. I’ll dig deeper.’
Gwen’s voice softened, though the words felt heavier for it. “Zayn says it’s strange. Even private people leave patterns, footprints, fragments, something. But this? It doesn’t fucking exist.”
Aster leaned back slowly, her expression stripped of its earlier amusement. “Okay. That’s…unnerving.”
The room quieted. Not the kind of lull that comes after laughter, but a dense, motionless stillness that carried its own gravity. It settled into the corners, pressed against the windows, and lingered over us with a weight that didn’t feel empty, only watchful.
I stared down at my hands, my fingers curled into pale crescents against my knees, then flexed them as if I might uncover an answer hidden in my skin. The tension that had followed me all day hummed again beneath the surface, steady and insistent, until it found its voice in the truth I’d been avoiding.
There was something about Hayden Stone that didn’t fit the world he occupied. Something that resisted belonging.
It wasn’t mere distance or coldness, that would have been easy to explain, a defense anyone could recognize. This was something far more deliberate in its construction, a silence shaped into armor. He carried the stillness of a man who had built walls out of discipline and buried whatever human remnants remained behind them.
And sitting there, half-drowned in candlelight and the muted flicker of the television, I began to see the edges of thepicture more clearly. The tailored suits, the flawless credentials, the immaculate phrasing and composed demeanor, all of it was seamless, almost too seamless. The perfection felt wrong, carefully arranged to conceal something fractured beneath the surface, the way a beautiful portrait might hang just slightly askew to draw your eyes away from the crack in the wall behind it.
“Maybe he just took a sabbatical,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. The words tasted hollow the moment they left my mouth.
Aster didn’t look away from the screen. “Sabbaticals don’t erase an entire digital footprint.”
Her tone was quiet, but it cut through the silence with unsettling precision. Gwen didn’t answer at first. She just stared at her phone, her features shadowed, her expression veiled by something I couldn’t read.
“Zayn said he’ll dig more tonight,” Gwen murmured finally, her voice carrying the weight of something she didn’t want to name.
