Sunday,I stand in our walk-in closet. Her clothes. Her shoes. Her tops are hanging off the edge where she left them last.
The scent of her is faint on the collar. My knees hit the floor before I realize I’ve fallen. I hold one of her shirts to my face and breathe it in like oxygen.
It hurts. God, it hurts. “I’m coming for you,” I whisper. “I swear to you, Claire. I’m coming.” But part of me fears I’m too late. Part of me feels her slipping further into the dark each day.
Part of me is terrified she’s losing hope in me. And that thought cracks something inside me so loudly it feels like a physical break. I bury my face in her shirt and allow the grief to consume me in a way I’ve never permitted myself to experience, not even during the war.
Because my love for Claire has revealed to me the one truth that terrifies me more than death: I cannot survive a world she isn’t in.
The second weekof the third month begins with the kind of silence that warns of storms. Not weather, something worse. A silence within me. A quiet place so deep it feels like standing at the bottom of a well. We’ve been working furiously on organizing how to get Claire back and have met with more resistance than we expected. Leif puts out feelers to his buddies at the federal office as well as local law enforcement. They have been providing us with a wealth of insider information that constantly occupies my mind.
My brothers watchme the way men watch a candle guttering in the dark, afraid of the moment it goes out. I don’t blame them. I barely recognize myself anymore. I stopped shaving. I live on caffeine and rage. My voice is either too sharp or too quiet.
I’ve lostweight from forgetting to eat; I’ve lost sleep from refusing to rest. My brothers try to intervene gently, then firmly.
“Erik,”Leif says one morning, “you need a few hours of sleep. Just a few.”
“I’ll sleepwhen she’s home.” Bjorn steps in front of me, palms raised like he’s approaching a wild animal.
“You’re going to collapse.”I meet his eyes, empty, unblinking.
“I don’t have that luxury.”There is no room inside me for anything except the thought of her, somewhere cold, somewhere afraid, somewhere thinking I’ve abandoned her.
That thought alone keepsme upright. That thought alone destroys me.
Grace triesto keep her distance from the worst of my unraveling, but she’s pregnant, emotional, and overwhelmed.One afternoon she breaks, quietly, with just a single sob she tries to cover with her hand.
I freeze.She flinches like she startled herself.
“I’m sorry,”she whispers. “I didn’t mean to; I just miss her. And I hate watching you suffer. I hate it so much.”
I swallow hard.
Her belly is so round now;Claire should have been here watching that progression with her. Grace is so close to her due date that the midwife says it could be any day now.
“It’s not your fault,”I say quietly. “None of this is.”
“But it feels like it is,”she murmurs. “I feel guilty being safe when she’s not.”
I want to comfort her.I want to say something gentle. But the words come out like sandpaper. “Claire wouldn’t want you to feel that.” She nods, wiping her eyes. “Then bring her home.”
As if Ineed the reminder.
By Wednesday morning,Axel has another lead, an abandoned lab on the city outskirts.
I go alone this time. They try to follow; I refuse. Inside the lab, the walls are stripped. Equipment removed. Floors scrubbed with industrial solvent. Empty. Like they’d never been there. Like Claire had never been there. I smash a stainless steel table into the floor.
My knucklesbleed from punching a wall. Still empty. Still nothing. Still gone. I stand in the center of the room, chest heaving, fists trembling. “Claire…”
Her name is a prayer.I drop to my knees in the middle of the barren room. For the first time, I think: What if I’m losing her? Not because I won’t find her. But because she won’t have anything left of herself by the time I do.
That thought breaks me.
Thursday night,everything shifts. Axel appears in the doorway of my office, face pale, tablet clutched in his hand.
“Erik… you need to see this.”My pulse spikes.
“What?”
