Chapter 3: Burnt Toast and Panic

A long convoy sped down the highway.

Our friends’ SUVs and my cousin’s rusty pickup followed behind the wedding company’s van, hazard lights blinking against the dark. Someone handed out coffee in gas station cups, and the back seats filled with the scent of burnt toast and panic. A couple of guys passed around a box of Dunkin’ donuts, nobody hungry enough to eat.

The wedding company’s job changed from picking up the bride to searching for a missing person.

My fiancée’s hometown was on the outskirts of our county, just past Maple Heights.

With no proper lighting, everyone held up their phones, using the faint glow to search the woods and fields.

The air was sharp with the scent of frost and pine needles. Mud clung to our shoes, and the beams from our phones bobbed through the trees, creating ghostly shadows. Someone played country music low on their phone, trying to break the tension.

“Rachel!”

“Rachel—!”

The shouts echoed, rising and falling, and my emotions churned like stormy waves.

How could a living person just disappear into thin air?

Every call of her name made my throat ache. Each time silence answered back, I felt a little less real—like the world had started to fold in on itself.

It was already below freezing in November in upstate New York.

The wind cut through my suit jacket, turning my fingers numb. My breath fogged in the air, swirling around the trembling hands holding my phone.

I wore the suit my fiancée had picked out for me, dialing her number over and over.

But all I got was:

“Sorry, the number you have dialed is powered off…”

That automated voice, so calm and empty, became a kind of torture.

We’d been together for four years in college. I knew her—she was sensitive and always wanted to be close to me.

Back in school, if a classroom had poor reception, she’d always tell me in advance.

She would never turn off her phone and disappear without a word.

A cold wind blew through, the chill seeping straight into my bones.

No matter how much I refused to believe it, a cold, rational voice in my head kept screaming: Something’s really wrong.

The dread felt physical—a knot tightening in my stomach, a pressure in my chest that made it hard to breathe.

When the pale dawn finally broke through the darkness, we’d been searching blindly for over three hours.

Suddenly, there was a commotion ahead—a figure collapsed to the ground.

I looked up. It was Rachel’s father, Ben Morgan.

He looked suddenly so much older, his back hunched with grief.

I hurried over to help him up. He was trembling, clutching his phone, his eyes bloodshot and tears streaming down his face:

“In the woods behind Oak Hollow, the police found the body of a woman who hanged herself…”

The world felt like it had stopped, the silence broken only by Ben’s ragged sobs and the far-off call of a crow.