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Afterspendingmostofthe following day on calls, my father joins the rest of us for dinner the following night and sits down with a heavy sigh.
“Any news?” my mother asks. Her voice is calm, but she can’t quite hide the flash of fear and sadness on her face.
My father shakes his head.
“No. Nothing.” He glances at me. “Were those all the names you could think of?”
I nod.
When I handed him the list, I didn’t have the heart to tell him I doubted she would go to any of them. Because if Theodora needed help, if she needed a safe place to go to, she wouldn’t have gone to Rose or Camille or Giselle or even Kayana, who lives in the UK, too. She wouldn’t have gone to Inessa, her best friend.
She would have comehere. She would have come tome.
“What are we going to do?” Zahara asks, swallowing thickly. “How are we going to find her?”
“There are people I can hire to try and track her down, but if she doesn’t have her phone with her, it won’t be easy.”
“Where on earth could she have gone?” My mother sighs, shaking her head. “That poor girl. I would never have imagined this could happen to her. Such a bright, lovely girl. She deserves better than this.”
My chest constricts. It’s felt tight all day—it’s felt tight ever since Theodora disappeared. But it continues to constrict, and a sudden terror seizes me. I grip my chest, realising I’m about to have another panic attack.
Zahara is first to realise. She scrambles up from her chair, crying out, “Zach! Zach, are you alright?”
I stand up, and my chair goes flying back behind me, crashing to the floor. My mother jumps, and my father’s face drops. I back away, not wanting them to see me like this, but stumble over my fallen chair. I fall hard.
Then I’m curled up on the floor, trying desperately to squeeze some air into my lungs. My pulse is a deafening drumbeat, going too fast, too fast.
It’s just a panic attack, I try to remember.
It’s just a panic attack.
I know it for a fact, but knowledge, as I’ve learned, is just not enough sometimes. I know what I’m supposed to do. Stay still, remind myself it will pass, try to breathe as slowly as possible, the three three three rule. I know all these things, but that knowledge is like a book in the hands of a person who can’t read. Completely useless.
Zahara drops onto her knees at my side and grabs my head to prop it on her lap. She bends over me and rubs my shoulder.
“It’s alright, Zach, you’re alright. I promise you you’re alright, okay? You’re alright.” Her hand is gentle on my shoulder as I gasp and wheeze. “You’re alright, Zach, you just have to breathe. Breathe for me, alright? I never ask you for favours, do I? So you have to do this for me. Breathe. Nice and slow. There, there.”
She remains patient the entire time, murmuring encouragements and little jokes. When my heartbeat finally settles, the pinprick-hole through which I’m breathing finally widens, and the air starts to flow back into my lungs, she smiles at me.
“I’m pretty sure I just saved your life, you know.”
I let out a strangled laugh. “Idiot.”
“Drama queen.”
I look up to see our parents standing above us. My father, as always, remains calm, but he’s holding my mother in his arms, and she looks distraught. I’ve never seen her look like this.
I sit up, and my mother rushes out of my father’s arms to sink to her knees, gathering Zaro and me into her arms and hugging us so hard she almost smashes our skulls together.
“I’m alright, Mum,” I whisper.
She kisses Zaro’s forehead, then mine. “We’re going to find her,” she whispers against my temple. “We’re going to find your beautiful Theodora, Zach. I promise.”
Butwedon’tfindher, and soon, half-term is over, and Zaro and I return to Spearcrest.
Everything seems to go back to normal: lessons, coursework deadlines, Apostles lectures. Our formal exam timetables are published, and we begin the final push of our studies.
But nothing is normal. Theodora’s ghost still lives at my side wherever I go, and her absence weighs heavy on my shoulders, sometimes so heavy it crushes the air from my lungs. Every day, I still open my phone to dial her number. Every night, I wake up with the same shock of panic that awoke me the night before she left.
