Chapter 5

My father' s anger still crackled in the air even after he ended the call with Charlotte. He turned to my mother, his face a thundercloud.

"I can't believe her. Calling us, panicking, right when we're dealing with this," he gestured vaguely towards the door of the morgue, towards me. "As if we don't have enough to worry about."

"She's just worried, Courtney," my mother said, though her voice lacked conviction.

"She needs to grow up. And so does Kelsie. I swear, Diane, if she ruins the press conference about Javon's scholarship offer tomorrow, I will personally drive her to a military academy."

He wouldn't. It was an empty threat, but it still stung.

My mother pulled out her phone again, her thumb hovering over my contact picture. A photo I hated. It was from a family portrait two years ago. I was standing slightly apart from the others, my smile forced. Javon had his arm around my mother, my father' s hand was on Javon' s shoulder. Charlotte was beaming. I looked like an intruder.

She pressed the call button. It went to voicemail, of course.

"Kelsie, this is your mother," she said, her voice dripping with ice. "Your little disappearing act is over. You have caused this family enough stress. You will call me back within the hour, or you will not like the consequences. And if you do anything to embarrass your brother tomorrow, so help me God..."

She trailed off, then hung up with a frustrated sigh.

"I hope she rots wherever she is," my mother muttered, shoving the phone back in her purse.

Her words, meant as a curse, were a prophecy. I was rotting. Just a few feet away from her.

Judge Adler Hendrix, who had followed them from the crime scene, looked between them with an expression of deep sadness. "Courtney, Diane... maybe you should file a missing persons report. Just to be safe."

My father scoffed. "And have the entire police force, my police force, looking for my daughter who's just hiding out at a friend's house? The press would crucify me. No. She'll be back. She always comes back."

He was right. I always did. The first time I was lost, I was five. I wandered away from a street fair. It took seven years for them to find me, living in a series of foster homes, lost in the system.

I remember the day they came for me. A social worker told me my parents had found me. I imagined a tearful, joyous reunion, like in the movies.

The reality was... different.

They stood in the doorway of the foster home, looking at me. I was twelve, scrawny, with tangled hair and a scar on my arm. I wasn't the little girl they had lost.

My mother's smile was tight, her eyes critical. "She's so... thin."

My father didn't smile at all. "Her name is Kelsie," he said to the social worker, as if confirming a piece of paperwork.

On the car ride back to their sterile, enormous house, Javon, then ten, sat between them. He had been adopted two years after I disappeared. He was everything I wasn't: confident, charming, athletic.

He looked at me and smirked. "So you're the ghost."

That's what I was. A ghost haunting my own family. A reminder of a past they had tried to move on from. They had built a new, perfect family on the foundations of my absence. My return was an unwelcome complication.

The love I had starved for was now directed entirely at Javon. He was the son they were proud of. I was the daughter who was a constant, disappointing reminder of failure.

Back in the present, a detective entered the waiting area. "Sir, we've run checks on recent missing persons reports. Nothing matches the victim's description."

"She's probably a runaway from out of state," another officer chimed in. "Or her family doesn't care enough to report her missing."

The words hung in the air. My family didn't care enough to report me missing. Because they had already decided who I was. I was a problem, an inconvenience, a source of drama.

My father sighed, looking genuinely weary. He turned to my mother.

"I almost feel sorry for them," he said quietly.

"Who?" she asked.

"The parents," he replied, his voice filled with a terrible, unknowing pity. "Whoever they are. To find out this is how their daughter ended up... It's every parent's worst nightmare."

It was their nightmare. They were living in it. They just hadn't woken up yet.