Her skin was a shade that didn’t belong to anyone alive.
I reached for her hand through the sheet.
It was cold.
The light inside her — the light that filled rooms and spilled over edges — was gone. Turned off. Like someone flipped a switch and stole the sun out of her.
And I never heard her laugh again.
I never askedwhat they did to her.
I didn’t need to.
The cruelty of how she died said enough.
What I remember most is the silence that came after.
The kind that stretches on and on, thick and endless. The kind that fills your ears until you start to believe it’s part of you — like grief is a second heartbeat that never stops hammering.
I still see Missy in the cornfield, sunlight catching the ends of her braids. Her mouth open in laughter that never reaches me.
Every time I blink, she disappears all over again. I turn to the photo I keep by my bed. The one from Tessa Calloway’s birthday. Missy’s last day. My last day of being twelve.
Sometimes, when the night is too heavy to breathe through, I trace our faces with my finger — mine small and awkward, hers bright and alive. That picture is the closest thing I have to proof that she ever existed. That I existed before everything cracked open.
That’s why I chose law. Not because I believe in justice, because I don’t. Justice is a word people use when they want to feel better about what they can’t fix. Because I don’t delude myself into believing that I can make any sort of change.
I believe in memory. In truth. In refusing to let the world bury what it wants forgotten.
My sister wouldn’t get to grow up. She wouldn’t fall in love. She wouldn’t have children or chase dreams or argue about music choices or complain about homework or sit on the porch with iced tea and talk about nothing and everything.
She was robbed of all of it — daughter, sister, friend, future. All stolen by boys who laughed while they took everything. Boys who still walk around breathing the same air she can’t.
That night in the cornfield took my childhood. It took my softness. It took the version of me who believed the world was safe if you stayed in the light.
I became what that night made me. A witness. A survivor. Someone who refuses to forget.
Every night, I dream of the field.
The corn whispering secrets I’ll never understand.
The sting of cuts across my skin.
My hands stained with dirt and blood.
Missy’s voice — bright, urgent — cutting through it all.
“Run.”
So I did.
I ran all the way into law school. All the way into writing stories nobody wants told. All the way into the life she never got to finish.
Justice isn’t a calling. It’s an inheritance. And the night the cornfields closed around us, I became its heir.
PART 2
Collision is not an accident here.
