The Substitute Daughter They Chose Over Me Chapter 06

The Substitute Daughter They Chose Over Me Chapter 06 Assumed Dead

Daniel’s POV-

She was right there.

That was the thing I could not get past. That was the thing sitting in the middle of every thought I had tried to have since the rescue team came back up that ridge with empty hands and faces that said everything their words were careful not to. She was right there. I looked down and saw her. I had seen per move her fingers. I had seen her turn her head and look up at me and I had looked back and I had turned away and now they were telling me they couldn’t find her.

“What do you mean you can’t find her,” I said.

The team leader was a solid woman in her fifties, efficient and weathered, the kind of person who delivered impossible news without flinching from it. She had the decency to look me in the eye when she said it.

“The ledge is empty,” she said. “No sign of the casualty. We’ve swept the ravine to the riverbed. Nothing.”

“That’s not possible.” I heard my own voice and didn’t recognise it. “She was on the ledge twenty minutes ago. I saw her. We all saw her. She was moving, she was conscious, she was right there.”

“Mr. Ashford.”

“She can’t have just disappeared. People don’t disappear off a ledge, they either climb up or they fall down and if she fell down you would have found something at the bottom, you would have found, there would be, there has to be something.”

The team leader let me finish. She was good at that, the patient stillness of someone who had learned that sometimes people needed to empty themselves out before they could hear anything.

“We found nothing at the base of the ravine,” she said. “No indication of a secondary fall. The river below is fast-moving. If she went into the water.” She paused. “It may take time.”

The river.

I turned away from her and walked to the edge of the trail and looked down. The ledge was there, exactly where it had been, grey and solid and jutting out from the rock face. Empty. Just rock and a few dried leaves and the fading light making shadows in the crevices.

I had been standing here. I had been standing right here and she had been down there and she had looked up at me and I had turned away.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum.

Something was wrong. Not wrong in the way the team leader meant, not the procedural wrong of a search that hadn’t concluded. Wrong in a way I didn’t have clean language for, something physical, something that sat in the centre of my chest like a frequency I couldn’t identify. A wrongness that felt almost like the opposite of what wrongness should feel like. Almost like, and this made no rational sense, almost like presence rather than absence.

Like she was somewhere. Not anywhere.

“Daniel.” Victor’s hand landed on my shoulder. He had aged ten years in the last hour. His face had the hollowed quality of a man confronting something he had structured his entire life to avoid confronting. “Come away from the edge.”

I didn’t move.

“The team is still searching,” he said. “They’ll find her.”

“She was right there,” I said. “Twenty minutes ago she was right there.”

He didn’t say anything to that. What was there to say? We had both been standing on this path and we had both seen her and we had both turned toward Vivian and neither of us had a single word that could star d next to that fact without being crushed by it.

Margaret was sitting on a flat rock further up the trail, her arms wrapped around herself, Thomas crouched beside her saying something low and continuous that she didn’t appear to be hearing. Vivian was standing slightly apart from all of them, her arms crossed, watching the rescue team work with an expression I couldn’t read from here.

A second team came up from the riverbed at dusk. Still nothing.

The team leader found me again as the light was going.

“We’re going to have to call it for tonight,” she said. “We’ll resume first light. The river current is strong and if she enters the water the search radius increases significantly downstream.” Another pause. “I have to be honest with you, Mr. Ashford. The longer the window without locating the casualty, the more likely the outcome changes.”

“She was alive,” I said. “She was alive and conscious and on that ledge and she was moving.”

“I understand that.”

“Then how.” I turned to look at her. “How does a living conscious person disappear off a three-foot ledge with a dislocated shoulder and nowhere to go. How does that happen.”

She held my eyes. “I don’t have an answer for that right now.”

I looked back at the ravine.

The searcher who had been with her, the man from the upper trail who had asked the question that nobody answered, had given his statement to the team and left before I thought to find him. I didn’t even know his name. He was the last person who had been beside her, who had spoken to her, who had been close enough to see her face, and I had let him walk away without asking him a single thing.

I had let a lot of things go without asking.

Night came down over the mountain fast and cold. The rescue team set up lights at the ravine access points and continued working below while the rest of us went inside because there was nothing else we could do, nowhere to put ourselves, nothing useful our presence on the trail accomplished.

I sat in the main room of the mountain house and looked at my phone. Her name was in my contacts. I had not deleted it, obviously I had not deleted it, and looking at it now felt obscene in a way I couldn’t fully articulate. Claire Ashford. Her name in my phone like everything was normal, like she was somewhere I could reach if I typed into the screen.

I called it.

Three rings. Then her voicemail. Her voice, careful and composed the way she always was on recorded things, asking the caller to leave a message.

I hung up.

I called it again. Just to hear it. Just to have something that was actually, verifiably, undeniably her.

Victor watched me from across the room but didn’t say anything. Thomas had put a glass of something n my hand at some point that I hadn’t touched. Vivian had gone to bed an hour ago without saying goodnight to anyone and the room had gotten fractionally easier to breathe in after that.

I pressed my hand against my chest again. That frequency. That wrongness that felt like the opposite of loss.

She had been right there.

Nobody disappeared from a ledge they were lying on twenty minutes before. Not with a dislocated shoulder and cracked ribs and nowhere to climb. Not without a trace, not without a sound, not without leaving anything behind for the teams to find.

Unless.

I didn’t finish the thought. It was too large and too impossible and too much of it depended on things I didn’t know yet and wasn’t sure I had the right to hope for.

I looked out the window. Outside, the lights of the search team moved slowly through the darkness below the ridge.

She had looked up at me from that ledge. She had found my face in the group above her and she had looked directly at me, and I had turned away.

That was the last thing I had done.

I sat in that room all night and I did not sleep and I did not drink what was in the glass and I kept my hand pressed flat against my chest where the thing that felt like presence instead of absence sat quietly and refused to leave.

By morning, they had found nothing.

Claire Ashford was declared missing, presumed dead.

I did not accept it.

I did not accept it for even one second.