Chapter Six

Freya

Angelina didn't argue with me. She didn't press the tablet back toward me or lecture me on denial or tell me I was being a fool, which was somehow worse than if she had. She simply smoothed the front of her coat, and tucked the tablet into my palm.

"When you're ready," she said, and walked out.

I hated her a little for that. It would have been easier to fight someone. It is very hard to keep insisting you don't need to look at something when the only person in the room has stopped asking you to.

Slowly, I stumbled back to my room.

An hour later, I stared at the tablet beside me on the bed. My hands shook as they finally reached out to it.

My name came up the instant I typed in just three of the first letters.

Freya Calloway.

And what came up under it, was way less than I expected. That was its own kind of insult — that a person could vanish and the world would only spend so many column inches on it before moving on to something else. A missing-person announcement, three sentences long, my photograph beside it looking younger than I remembered feeling. A police appeal for information, dated a week later, already smaller than the first. Then, weeks after that, a report — vague, hedged in the careful language of people who didn't actually know anything — suggesting evidence indicated I had last been seen travelling with an unidentified man before I disappeared.

I read that twice, and something cold moved through me that had nothing to do with the hospital air conditioning.

An unidentified man.

They hadn't just let me disappear. They'd given me a story to disappear into.

Then came the "accident." Authorities had, apparently, concluded it was likely I'd died in a vehicle collision on a rural road outside the city — evidence, unspecified, had connected me to a wreck. My remains were never recovered. The article used that exact phrase, never recovered, clinical and final, like I was cargo lost overboard.

I scrolled further, and found the funeral.

There were photographs. Real ones, professionally taken, the kind commissioned for a family that cared how their grief looked in print. My mother in black, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, her eyes red in a way that looked, for one traitorous second, like actual devastation. My father beside the coffin — closed, of course, empty, because there had been nothing to put in it — accepting condolences with his jaw tight and his shoulders bowed, the picture of a man carrying more than he could hold.

And Selene. Selene in dark, elegant mourning, clutching Adrian's arm like she might collapse without it, her face arranged into something so convincingly wrecked that if I hadn't watched her smile at me over a balcony railing, I might have believed it myself.

For one horrible, humiliating moment, something in my chest loosened.

They cried. They actually cried.

They loved me after all. Whatever else had happened — Adrian, Selene, the balcony, the woods — my parents had stood over an empty coffin and grieved a daughter they'd spent twenty-six years finding reasons not to look at. Some small, starving part of me, the part that had spent a lifetime doing extra to earn a fraction of what Selene got for simply existing, wanted so badly to believe that grief was real that it didn't ask a single question.

Then I looked at the dates.

The funeral had been held eleven days after I disappeared.

Eleven days.

I read it again, certain I'd misunderstood, certain the translation of the timeline was somehow off. It wasn't. Eleven days from missing to buried. No extended search. No task force. No months of agonized waiting the way families do when they refuse to give up hope. Just eleven days, and then a funeral, professionally photographed, tastefully lit.

I kept scrolling, and the loosening in my chest turned to something with teeth.

The investigation had been formally closed within six weeks. My parents — not the police, not a court, my parents — had petitioned for me to be legally declared dead on an expedited basis, citing the family's need for "closure" and the "undue strain" of prolonged uncertainty on Calloway Textiles' operations. The court had granted it without much apparent resistance. Grief, it turned out, moved very efficiently when there was a company on the line.

And Calloway Textiles' product division — the one I had built at eighteen with nothing but spreadsheets and stubbornness, the one that had never once had my name on its door despite carrying my fingerprints on every contract — had been transferred into new leadership within the same quarter.

Selene's leadership.

I sat with that for a long moment, the tablet trembling slightly in my hands, or maybe it was my hands trembling and the tablet was simply along for it.

Then I found the interview.

It was a society piece, glossy, six months after the funeral, my mother photographed in the sitting room I'd grown up eating dinner in alone while the rest of the family posed for the good camera. The interviewer had asked, gently, how the family was coping with such an unimaginable loss.

Margaret's answer was three paragraphs long. I read every word of it twice.

She spoke about grief, about resilience, about how tragedy either breaks a family or reveals its true strength. And then, near the end, she said it — the line that would sit in my chest like a splinter for the rest of that night and long after: that through it all, Selene had held the family together. That Selene had been the one to step forward when it mattered, to carry what needed carrying, to become — my mother's exact words, printed in careful serif type — "the daughter who held us together through tragedy."

The daughter.

Singular. As though there had only ever been one worth counting.

I kept scrolling, faster now, something reckless and hollow driving my thumb across the screen, because some part of me needed to see exactly how thoroughly I had been erased before I could let myself stop.

My name appeared less and less. A caption here, a footnote there, and then not at all. Every article after that first year mentioned Selene — Selene at galas, Selene photographed beside my father at shareholder meetings, Selene quoted discussing "the division she'd taken over," never once with my name attached to the work I had built stone by stone since I was eighteen years old.

She wasn't only in Adrian's life now.

She was in mine.

Every room I had ever fought to earn a place in, every photograph I had never been allowed to stand close enough for, every sentence my mother had never once said about me while I was alive to hear it — Selene had simply walked into all of it, eleven days after they buried an empty box with my name on it, and made it hers.

I set the tablet down very carefully on the blanket, the way you set down something you're afraid might shatter if you let your hand shake even slightly harder than it already was.

They hadn't just let me disappear.

They had replaced me. Efficiently. Gratefully. Within a single quarter.

And somewhere in Chicago, my mother was still telling reporters what a comfort her daughter had been to her — and meaning Selene.