“What do you mean?” I asked.
My voice sounded weak. Smaller than I remembered.
Daniel did not move. He stood with one hand resting against the wall, dressed in a dark sweater and jeans, his jaw tight, his eyes red in a way that told me he had not slept much. Daniel had never liked me completely, but he had always been civil. He was a mechanic, practical, quiet, the kind of man who said little because he believed words were only useful when they fixed something.
That night, he looked at me like I was something too broken to repair.
“I mean she’s gone,” he said.
My stomach dropped.
“Gone where?”
He gave a short, humorless breath. “That’s the first thing you ask?”
“What else am I supposed to ask?”
“You could start with whether she’s alive.”
The room tilted.
The envelope in my hand bent under my fingers. I looked again at the wheelchair in the living room, at the crumpled blanket, at the untouched medication tray. For ten days I had imagined nothing. I had forced myself to imagine nothing. Not Lauren struggling to reach a glass of water. Not Lauren calling my name in the empty house. Not Lauren staring at the front door, waiting for footsteps that never came.
Now every image attacked me at once.
“Is she?” I whispered.
Daniel’s face changed. Not softened exactly, but something in it shifted, as if my fear had arrived too late to mean anything.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s alive.”
The relief hit so hard I had to put one hand on the back of the sofa.
Alive.
The word should have saved me. Instead, it only opened another door to fear.
“Then where is she?”
Daniel looked toward the kitchen table, where the papers were spread in neat, damning piles. “Read the letter.”
