I keep scrolling.The thread ends abruptly yesterday.
019473:Today.3 p.m.Not the mall.Easier for you.Your place.Back garden gate.I’ll knock twice.
“He told her to let him in,” I say.
Raven grabs the doorframe like she needs the house to hold her up.“She would never,” she says, and then, more quietly, “She might.If she thought she was getting answers.Answers she should have gotten from us.”
“She wouldn’t invite a stranger,” I say.“But you have to think like an eleven-year-old.Half the kids these days meet their friends this way.So this wasn’t a stranger.Not to her.It was a voice that knew her father’s name.”
Raven squeezes her eyes shut, opens them again.“Declan McAllister.”
I screenshot the thread, email the images to myself, to Raven, to Vinnie.I forward them to the detective with a single line.
Belinda’s secure chat suggests a meeting arranged at our back gate yesterday, 3:00 p.m.
Raven’s breath hitches.“We were home.Oh my God.We were home.”
I pull up the printer queue again and point.“And then this.”
Raven swallows.“What does it mean?”
“It means he was in this house,” I say.“Or close enough to shepherd her to the desk and tell her what to type.”
Raven steadies.I watch it happen—the brittle part in her spine stiffening into steel.
“Working on it,” Vinnie says.“I’m mapping proximity alerts to our phones and locking down every profile that isn’t ours.”
I nod, my eyes still on 019473.Numbers.Anonymous.A string you use when you don’t want to be found.
I scroll higher, looking for a tell—an idiom, a phrase, a spelling tic.Anything.The messages are clipped.Exact.Someone practiced at saying nothing.
I pull the laptop’s cord so I don’t have to risk battery sleep, and then openDownloads, Documents, Desktop—anywhere a kid might stash something.Sheet music PDFs, a half-finished essay on Harriet Tubman, a folder of photos titledSummer.I open it—Belinda’s selfies, the puppy she begged for in June, Vinnie asleep with a book on his chest, Raven’s hand in the frame holding a can of Orange Crush.
Raven is still beside me, close enough that I can feel the tremor in her breath.“You’re good at this,” she says softly.
“I’m motivated,” I reply.
She touches my shoulder, just once.“We’ll get her back.”
“We will,” I say, because I can’t bring myself to think anything else.
I switch back toSpeakSecure.chatand click the profile for 019473.
There’s nothing there.
Of course there isn’t.
But you can’t message a minor into her yard and stay invisible forever.
Wewillfind him.
I close my eyes, picture the path from the garden gate to this chair, imagine the way his voice might have sounded coming through the dark.Probably calm and promising.So a girl who wants answers more than anything would have listened.
Okay, chef.Okay, shadow.Okay, numbers.
You knocked twice.Now it’s my turn.
Vinnie is downstairs barking into his phone about camera access.Raven paces the hallway, one hand pressed to her forehead, muttering logistics about contacts, lawyers, private investigators.I can’t sit still long enough to process.The silence in Belinda’s room hums under my skin like static.
