Downstairs, the kitchen hummed with the scent of toast and over-brewed tea. Ezra stood in the doorway, taking it all in. Sunlight on the tiles, the low whir of the kettle, the clink of a spoon against a mug. It was all so utterly normal it made his skin crawl.

His mum was at the counter in her dressing gown, hair clipped back, stirring something into her tea. His dad sat at the table, engrossed in the news on his tablet, a deep line etched between his brows.

Ezra hovered, not yet ready to speak.

“Morning,” his mum said without turning. “You’re up early for a Saturday. That’s new.”

He tried to smile, but his face felt stiff.

His dad glanced up. “Everything all right?”

Ezra rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I need to ask you something. A serious question.”

That got their attention.

His mum slowly lowered her spoon.

His dad set the tablet aside.

“Is there any… history of memory problems in the family?” Ezra asked, his voice careful. “Like… dementia? Early onset? Anything weird like that?”

A beat of silence.

His mum frowned. “Why would you ask that?”

Ezra shrugged, but the movement was too quick, too defensive. “I’ve just been feeling… off. I woke up and some things were missing. Or felt wrong. Like maybe I’m misremembering something important.”

His dad tilted his head. “You’ve forgotten something and jumped straight to dementia? A bit dramatic, don’t you think?”

Ezra exhaled sharply. “Not just forgotten. Like… whole gaps. People. Things I know were there yesterday.”

His mum gave him a look of genuine concern. She walked over, mug in hand. “Sweetheart, what exactly is going on?”

He hesitated. “Do either of you remember Willow?”

The name hung in the air, thick and still as fog. His parents exchanged a glance.

“Willow?” his dad repeated. “Is that someone from school?”

“My girlfriend,” Ezra said, the words feeling foreign on his tongue. “Well… was. I think. I don’t know. Four months. Since Halloween. You met her at Christmas.”

His mum blinked. “I’m… I don’t think so. You haven’t brought anyone home in ages. Not since… what’s her name? Melanie?”

Ezra felt the floor shift beneath him. “No. Not Melanie. Willow. Long dark hair, hated coconut, wore glittery boots sometimes. Loved thunderstorms. She helped me clean the gutters when Dad slipped a disc, remember?”

His dad made a face. “I cleaned the gutters myself. With a heat pack taped to my back.”

“She brought you ginger tea,” Ezra insisted, his voice rising. “Mum, you told her she reminded you of your sister. You asked about her plans for uni.”

His mum’s brow furrowed deeper. “That… doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” Ezra muttered, the words laced with bitterness. “Because she’s been erased.”

“Excuse me?” his dad said, his voice sharpening.

Ezra waved a hand, frustrated. “Forget it. This is pointless.”

“No,” his mum said gently. “It’s not. You’re obviously upset. Maybe it’s just stress? You’ve got mock exams coming up. You’ve not been sleeping well. Sometimes when we’re tired or anxious, memories blur together. You could be mixing up people. Names. Things that happened with someone else.”

“I’m not mixing anything up,” Ezra said, his voice tight. “I remember her. I remember things no dream could fake.”

His dad sighed, picking up his mug. “You kids are online too much. Half the time I think your brains are just buffering real life like it’s a dodgy stream.”

Ezra stared at him, disbelief flooding his face. “Seriously?”

“I’m not saying you’re lying,” his dad said, not unkindly. “But maybe you saw someone like this Willow in a film, or online, or a story. You put pieces together and your brain ran with it.”

“I’m not imagining her,” Ezra snapped, his control fraying. “She was real. She is real. And no one remembers her but me.”

His mum touched his arm. “Hey. Deep breath.”

He did not take one. “This isn’t some online trend,” he said, his voice lower now, raw with desperation. “This isn’t like that Shazam thing people think existed, or Mandela dying in prison. I’m not misremembering a cereal mascot. I remember her. Down to the stupid freckles on her knee. Don’t tell me that’s a dream.”

“Okay,” his mum said carefully. “What do you want us to do?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it. “I don’t know,” he muttered.

His dad stood and rinsed out his mug. “You probably need a break from your screen. Clear your head.”

“You need a nap,” his mum added softly. “Or a long walk. Something grounding. You’ve been living inside your head too much lately.”

Ezra stood still, their words floating past him, irrelevant. He could see now that they were not going to believe him. Maybe they could not. Or, maybe, something had already rewritten their memories too, edited her out like she was a typo.

He stepped back. “I’m going out.”

“Where are you—?” his mum started, but he was already halfway to the door.

“Ezra!” his dad called after him. “You’re not thinking straight.”

He did not respond.

Did not turn around.

Did not trust himself to speak without his voice cracking.

Outside, the day had warmed, but Ezra barely felt it. He walked without really seeing, his shoes crunching over loose gravel. He passed low fences and parked cars. Everything around him seemed too sharp, too vivid. The light bouncing off the pavement felt aggressive. All the colours looked wrong. Oversaturated. It was as if the world was trying too hard to seem normal.

He stopped at the corner by the phone box no one used anymore and leaned against it, pulling his phone from his pocket. His fingers were shaking, so he gripped it tighter.

Think. Prove it.

He opened his school’s student portal and typed Willow Archer into the search bar.

No results.

He tried again, adjusting the spelling. Just Willow. Then Archer. Then W. Archer.

Still nothing.

He moved on to the staff directory. Maybe a teacher had mentioned her. A parent contact. An incident report. Anything.

Still nothing.

His heart thudded louder. He adjusted his grip and opened Instagram again. Not his profile this time, but other people’s. His friends, mutuals. Paige. Jamie. Their tagged photos. Willow had definitely commented on Jamie’s Halloween post. She had argued in the thread about whether candy corn counted as a proper sweet. She had even sent him a cursed meme in the replies.

Gone.

The comment thread was still there, but it skipped straight from Jamie to Ezra like she had never commented in between.

He tapped out of the app and into the Year 12 Google Drive folder, the shared one for class projects. He opened the poetry anthology they had all contributed to in English. Willow had written a piece called Storm Logic. He remembered it clearly. Two stanzas about rain hitting windows.

The document was still there. He scrolled through it.

Her name was not.

She had been removed from the contributor list entirely. The pages renumbered themselves without her.

He blinked. His jaw clenched.

No. No, no, no.

He closed the tab and went straight to Google. Search: Willow Archer King Arthur Grammar. Then Willow Archer Belfast. Willow Archer student. Teen. Seventeen. Poet. Local news.

Each result was more irrelevant than the last. A retired florist in Glasgow. A LinkedIn page for a dietician. A children’s book about a rabbit named Willow.

He tried image search next. Typed her name and added keywords: rain, school, photo booth, Halloween, glitter boots.

Nothing.

It was like the internet did not just forget her. It had never even been introduced to her.

His legs felt shaky, so he walked to a bench outside the corner shop. He sat down and rested his elbows on his knees, staring at his screen like it might finally admit the joke and give her back.

No notification came.

No saved photo popped up.

No name filled itself in.

The longer he sat there, the more the white noise of traffic and footsteps on concrete around him settled into something heavier. Not absence. Not emptiness. It was a feeling of overwhelming loss.

He typed Willow Archer disappeared into the search bar, thinking maybe, just maybe, it had been newsworthy. Maybe she was missing, and no one had told him. Maybe he would find a police report, a hotline, a plea from her parents.

Instead, there was an article about a runaway in Manchester, five years ago. A fundraising campaign for someone’s missing cat named Willow. A review of a bad play in Brighton starring a Susan Archer.

He refreshed his search. This time, he left the search bar blank, and he just stared at it. For the first time since waking up, the full weight of it all pressed down on him.

If the school records did not show her… if her poetry was gone… if she had no digital footprint… if no one else remembered… Then it was not just his phone. It was not a software issue, or some kind of online scrubbing. It was everything about her. Gone.

Ezra sat back against the bench. What he was feeling was not just grief or confusion. It was the kind of wrong that lived under the skin. It was like a dislocated joint that had not healed right.

She had been here. She had.

He thought about her singing that ridiculous 2000s pop song on the bus after the museum trip. The way she had cried when they visited the old cinema, and the owner told them it was closing down. Her absolute obsession with Japanese vending machine drinks.

Those memories were not fake.

He did not make them up.

You cannot imagine an entire person. You cannot fabricate emotional weight. He remembered the feel of her hand in his. The scratch of her handwriting on his arm with a biro when she had run out of paper.

People do not just vanish like that. Without a trace.

They do not.

Unless someone wants them to.

Unless someone was making it happen.

CONTINUE READING