365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 01

They forgot my name.

Not for a day. Not for a week.

For three hundred and sixty-five days.

Tonight, I forgot theirs back.

I rolled my bike down the gravel drive with the engine dead, past the gatehouse, past the cameras my brother installed and never once checked. At the end of the driveway I stopped and looked back at the house I was born in.

Twenty-two windows. Every single one lit.

Not one of them looking for me.

“Goodbye,” I whispered. “You won’t miss me. I’ll miss you anyway. That’s the part that makes me pathetic.”

Then I kicked the Ducati awake and let it scream.

My name is Rowan Vale. I’m the seventh child and the only daughter of Marcus and Giselle Vale, and if that name means nothing to you, it means everything to everyone who matters. Vale Maritime. Vale Holdings. Three centuries of old money, six older brothers, and one father who used to call me his last good thing.

Used to.

One year ago, at my seventeenth birthday party, my mother covered the ballroom in indigo and oxblood because I refuse to wear pink. She hunted down black candles and dark plums and my grandmother’s silver. She spent four months on a party for a girl who hates parties, and she got every detail right.

“Rowan. Outside. Now,” Asher had said, my oldest brother, grinning like a kid.

I screamed like a five-year-old when I saw it. A matte-black Ducati, indigo and oxblood pinstriping, my initials on the tank. Jacket. Boots with a two-inch heel and armor in the shins, because Mom got a vote and Mom always wins.

“Don’t ride it until Asher teaches you,” Dad said. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” I said, straight-faced.

I’d been stealing Asher’s bike for six months.

I hugged all seven of them that night. I remember thinking: nobody in the world is this lucky.

I woke up the next morning and the house had stopped speaking to me.

I don’t mean they were cold. Cold would have been a relationship. I mean I walked into the kitchen and my mother looked directly through my forehead like I was a window with a nice view.

“Morning, Mom.”

Nothing. She kept talking to her assistant about linen samples.

“Dad, do you need me at the nine o’clock?”

His office door closed.

I told myself it was a bad day. Everyone gets bad days.

Then it was a bad week.

Then it was a bad month, and I stopped counting the mornings I ate breakfast alone at a table set for nine.

Here’s what nobody tells you about being erased: it doesn’t hurt like a knife. It hurts like drowning in a room full of people who are laughing.

I tried everything. I got louder. I got quieter. I got better — top of my class, top of my shooting scores, three languages. I ran the kitchen’s Sunday dinners for two hundred staff single-handed at sixteen, and my mother walked past the dining room and didn’t glance in.

I broke a coffee mug at Dad’s feet once, on purpose, just to see if he’d look up.

He stepped over the pieces.

That was the night I stopped being their daughter and started being an observer in their house. And an observer sees everything. I know which stairwell has no camera. I know the rotation of every patrol on our property. I know which brother lies to Dad about where he was on Thursdays.

I know the exact minute the gate guard changes shift, which is how I’m crossing the county line right now at eighty-two miles an hour with everything I own strapped to my back.

I’m not running away. I’m reporting for duty.

Eleven days ago, a black envelope came to a P.O. box my family doesn’t know I have. Inside, one card, embossed with a silver crown and three words that changed my life.

Then, four nights ago, something else happened. Something I still can’t explain.

A voice woke me up at 11:03 p.m. Singing. Inside my skull.

“Happy birthday, Rowan,” she said.

“You’re a week early,” I told her.

And she laughed and said, “No, sweetheart. You were born a week late. They’ve been celebrating the wrong day your whole life.”

By sunrise, my family will have a house with an empty room in it.

It’ll take them seven more days to notice.