My Family Chose Her And Lost Me Forever Chapter 06
Next morning, Dad drove home before it was fully light. The house was silent.
He pushed open the mudroom door.
Twelve square feet. Concrete floor swept clean. Every trace of me — gone.
“Give her a few days, Dad,” Ryan said behind him. “She’ll come home.”
A week passed. I didn’t.
Mom cracked on day five and called 911.
“My daughter’s missing — her phone’s off, she blocked us, she—”
The dispatcher cut her off.
“Ma’am, how old is your daughter?”
“She just turned eighteen.”
The tone flattened.
“Ma’am, she’s a legal adult. Voluntary loss of contact isn’t a missing person case. If she’s chosen to break contact, we can’t open a file.”
Mom set the phone down and stood in the middle of the living room staring at nothing.
Ryan drove out to Northwestern.
The admissions office pulled her up.
“Anna Mercer? No record of enrollment. She declined the offer.”
He drove to the state testing office.
The woman behind the desk looked up at him.
“Sir, her application is blank. She didn’t submit a single choice.”
Ryan stood in the atrium with his phone in his hand.
Northwestern. Full ride. Declined.
And no other schools listed. Anywhere.
At the same moment. Nairobi. Ninety-eight degrees on the tarmac.
I came out of the terminal and the heat hit like an oven door.
My contact was a wiry man in his forties, grey at the temples, skin the deep brown of long years outside. Everybody at the compound called him Marcus.
“Anna Mercer?”
“Yeah.”
“Eighteen?”
“Yeah.”
He looked me up and down.
“You’re the youngest volunteer I’ve picked up all year.”
“Water in the truck. Drink some.”
The compound was thirty kilometers outside the city, then another transfer overland to the field station. Corrugated tin roofs. Eight to a bunkhouse. Communal showers.
I dropped my duffel on a metal bed frame and looked around.
There was a bed. It wasn’t the floor. That was already more than I’d had at home.
Meanwhile Mom, back in the kitchen, dropped a bowl when Ryan told her.
“What do you mean, blank? She scored top of her class! She could have gone anywhere!”
“She didn’t submit anything.”
“Then where—”
Ethan pushed the door open without knocking. His face had no color in it.
“I found her.”
He turned his phone around.
Flight record. ET837. August 27. San Francisco to Nairobi.
“Africa. UN-affiliated infrastructure aid. Seven-year term. Personal communications surrendered on arrival.”
Mom’s knees went. She caught the edge of the table.
“Seven — seven years without—”
Ethan didn’t answer.
He scrolled up through his messages with me. Three years of us. Ten screens, top to bottom.
Fewer than five he had initiated.
He scrolled his messages with Lily. One day filled fifteen screens.
First day at the field station, the site lead dropped a stack of paper on my desk.
“Previous rotation left this. Safety assessment for the school build. It’s a mess. Redo it.”
I stayed up all night with it.
At eight the next morning I handed it back. He read for ten minutes and looked up.
“You’re eighteen?”
“Yeah.”
“This is better than what my grad students hand in.”
At lunch, Marcus came past the mess table with an extra tray and set it down next to mine.
“You’re too thin. Eat.”
Next day, another tray.
Day after, the same.
I asked him why.
He said, “A kid your age, this far from home — whoever let you come out here alone doesn’t deserve you. Costs me nothing to grab an extra plate.”
I looked down at the tray. I didn’t let him see my face.
That same night, back home, Mom went into the mudroom for the first time.
The bulb had gone. She held her phone up as a flashlight and moved things aside in the corner.
She found a plastic bag. Old drawings, going yellow. Crayon, marker. Ages five, six, seven.
She’d forgotten I used to draw. That I used to come running down the stairs holding up a piece of paper.
Mom, Mom, look what I made—
What had she been doing?
Warming a bottle for Lily.
She sat down on the concrete floor of the mudroom, the drawings in her lap, and something in her throat closed up completely.
Ryan pulled the photo albums out that night. Almost every photo had Lily in it.
He had to flip all the way to the back to find one of me.
Eleven, twelve years old. Standing under the oak tree behind Grandma’s cabin. Grandma next to me, hand on my shoulder.
He remembered that day. He hadn’t wanted to take the photo. Grandma had asked him — please, honey, just one of Anna and me — and he’d rolled his eyes and pressed the shutter to shut her up.
He remembered other things.
That bangle isn’t worth anything.
You’re obsessed with a dead woman’s stuff.
If you’re not helping pay this family’s debt, get out.
Well. She’d gotten out.
Why didn’t he feel better?