Ezra blinked awake to soft sunlight slanting through the slats of his blinds, warm and golden across the mess of clothes on his bedroom floor. For a moment, the world was quiet. Peaceful, even. Dust motes danced lazily in the air, and the hum of a distant lawnmower buzzed faintly beneath the silence. He let out a slow breath, stretching, his limbs heavy with sleep.
His hand reached automatically for his phone on the nightstand.
There was a text from his mum reminding him about dinner at Aunt Gilly’s.
Nothing from Willow.
Odd.
He stared at the screen for a beat longer than usual. Willow was a morning person. By now she would have sent some ridiculous meme, or a photo of her cat mid-yawn with a caption like he understands my existential dread. Always something. A “good morning, loser” at the very least.
He scrolled through his messages, thumb flicking faster now, until he hit the top.
No ‘W’.
Frowning, he tapped into his contacts and typed her name.
Nothing.
His heart gave a small, sharp kick.
No. That could not be right.
He checked again. Willow Archer. Maybe he had accidentally deleted the contact. Maybe he had saved her under something stupid, like “Wills” or “Glitter Gremlin” or whatever nickname she had last allowed.
Every possible version turned up blank.
Still frowning, he opened his photo gallery. He started swiping through the months, all the way back to December, November, October. He was like a man chasing a dream that refused to stay still.
The photo of her in the blue dress. Gone.
The one from in front of the Titanic Museum at sunset, her hair haloed by the light like something out of a painting. Gone.
Their selfies at the movies. The blurry one from Halloween.
The photo he always came back to. The one of her in the rain, arms outstretched, eyes closed, like she belonged to another world.
Gone.
All of it.
His stomach twisted. Maybe… maybe it was a bug. Some update. Maybe his phone had rolled back to a backup point. He sat up, more sharply than he intended, and pulled open his cloud backups. His fingers moved on muscle memory: Google Photos. Drive. WhatsApp.
He typed her name in every field he could think of.
Still nothing.
He did not realise he had stopped breathing until his vision fuzzed slightly at the edges.
Had he deleted them by mistake? Last night when he had been half-asleep?
Or had he been hacked?
If that was the case… Why would someone erase just Willow?
And more than that. If she was not in his phone, was not in his cloud, not online, then where was she?
His heart was thudding now, quick and loud in his chest. He tried to reason through it. Maybe she had blocked him. Unfriended. Unfollowed. Even that did not explain the photos. They were his. She could not delete those. And why would she? They had not argued. Not seriously. Not in a way that would—
He rubbed his face, trying to remember the last thing she had said to him.
What was the last message? The last call?
It was there. Just on the edge of something, but when he reached for it, it slid out of focus. Like a word on the tip of his tongue.
He remembered her laugh. Loud, unrestrained, almost obnoxious.
He remembered the tiny scar on her chin from when she fell off her bike as a kid.
He remembered her crying during that ridiculous animated film because “the whale was too sad, Ezra!”
He remembered the feel of her hand in his. Her cool fingers always twitching, like she was on the verge of saying something important and never quite got the words out.
That was not a dream. You cannot dream up months of memories.
Could you?
He threw the covers off and stood, suddenly too hot. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet as he moved to the window, lifting the blind slightly to peer out.
The street looked normal. Quiet. Birds darted between the trees lining the pavement. Mr Peterson across the road was trimming his hedges with shears and humming something faintly tuneless.
It was too normal.
Ezra backed away from the window and sat on the edge of his bed, gripping his phone like it might offer answers if he held it tightly enough.
The dread was quiet. Not a scream but a whisper at the back of his mind, curling inwards like smoke. Something was wrong. He could feel it. In his bones, in the tiny prickling hairs on his arms. In the way silence stretched just a little too long between things.
He stood again and started pacing.
Think. Think.
He opened Instagram. Search bar. Willow Archer.
Nothing.
Facebook. Twitter. TikTok.
No user. No tags. No posts. No photos. No footprints.
It was like she had never existed.
But she had.
He knew it. In the same way he knew his own name. In the way his mouth still remembered the shape of hers.
He sat back down, slower this time. A creeping numbness started at the base of his spine. The kind that comes before cold sets in. His thumb hovered over her name in a draft message. He had typed it in out of habit.
The app prompted: This contact does not exist.
He stared at it. That single sentence. That deletion. Like reality had folded over a page and glued it shut.
He dropped the phone on the bed.
It bounced once, landing face-down.
His breathing had changed. It was quicker and shallower. He ran a hand through his hair, and his fingers caught in the curls. The silence around him felt heavier now, like the air itself had thickened.
She had been here. In this room. That hoodie in the corner, she had borrowed it after they got caught in the rain. That cushion. She had once launched it at him in mock fury because he said Pride and Prejudice was “kind of slow.” That mug on the desk. She used it for her terrible herbal tea.
And yet, there was no online proof that said: this girl existed.
He stumbled to the bathroom. His limbs felt leaden, and his chest felt tight.
The mirror above the sink greeted him with a version of himself he barely recognised. His pale skin was tinged slightly grey, his curly hair was wild and flattened on one side, his eyes were wide and rimmed with something that looked too much like fear. The silence here was deeper. Harsher. No street noise made it through the double glazing. No birdsong. Just the echo of his own breath bouncing off the tile.
He gripped the sides of the sink with both hands. Hard.
His fingertips had gone cold.
“Willow,” he said, his voice quiet, hoarse. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder this time. “Willow Archer.”
He watched his lips move in the mirror. It was as if they belonged to someone else.
“Seventeen. Went to King Arthur Grammar.” He swallowed. “Favourite film: Weathering for You. Favourite food: raspberry mochi. Laughed like a car stalling. Loved thunderstorms.”
Still no confirmation from the universe. Just his own reflection, staring back at him.
He hated the look in his eyes. They looked desperate, like the moment just after something dreadful happened. He tried to hold himself still, to breathe properly, but something beneath his skin was buzzing.
It was not just that she was gone. It was as if she had been peeled out of the world. Deliberately. Precisely. Without a trace.
He shook his head and turned on the tap. He leaned forward and splashed cold water over his face. It shocked him enough to pull his mind back from the brink, but only for a second. As he reached for a towel, he caught another glimpse of himself in the mirror.
Something, just for a second, looked wrong.
His reflection was a breath behind.
He blinked, heart lurching, but when he looked again, it was normal.
He gripped the sink harder, knuckles whitening.
Get it together.
This was probably some kind of mental break. Or a waking nightmare. Or… a hallucination brought on by stress. That was what people said, wasn’t it? When your brain overloaded, it filled in gaps with things that were not real. Willow was real, though. She had weight. Shape. Specifics. She was not a dream construct. She was not something invented by a tired brain.
She was someone.
He closed his eyes and tried again.
“Willow. You hated coconut. You used to tap your nails when you were bored, but only with your left hand. You refused to watch horror films because you said your dreams were already scary enough.”
A tremble started in his fingers and crawled up to his wrists. He was not cold. Not really. Although his body did not seem to know that.
He opened his eyes.
His reflection did the same.
“I'm not making you up,” he whispered.
What if he was?
No.
He could not accept that.
He forced himself to breathe slowly, evenly, counting seconds in and out like his parents had taught him for panic attacks. He was not sure this counted as one, but something was rising in him, hot and desperate, and he did not know where to put it.
The silence in the bathroom stretched long. It was usually comforting here. Predictable. Now it just felt wrong. Like something was missing. Like the whole world had a gap in it where Willow used to be.
He backed away from the sink, only half aware of what he was doing, and sat on the edge of the bath.
Maybe she was just gone. Moved away in the middle of the night. Maybe her family had to go into witness protection. Changed numbers. Deleted her socials. Ghosted him entirely. People did that. Sometimes without warning.
Even if that had happened, all those things should still be on his phone, though, but there was no trace of her.
He rubbed his arms, trying to shake off the chill. His mouth was dry.
This could not just be nothing. It was not normal.
He remembered reading something once, about early-onset dementia. How sometimes it started with things going missing. Memories slipping out of order. Entire people being forgotten. Was that what this was?
Was something wrong with him?
He would ask his parents, he thought suddenly. Maybe there was a family history no one had ever mentioned. Maybe this had happened before to someone else.
He stood, legs slightly shaky.
His reflection moved with him.
Normal now.
He turned away from the mirror and pressed his palm against the cool tile on the wall.
Focus.
CONTINUE READING