365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 03

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 03 — Zero Missed Calls
The voice came four nights before I left.

11:03 p.m. Singing. A woman’s voice, low and warm, curling through my head like smoke through a keyhole.

I sat straight up in the dark with my heart trying to climb out of my throat.

“Happy birthday, Rowan.”

“You’re a week early,” I said out loud, like an idiot, to my own skull.

“You were born a week late. Your father was in Rotterdam. Your mother told the doctor to write down the day she’d already sent the announcements for.” A laugh. “Eighteen years of the wrong birthday, and you’ve never once been on time for anything. Now you know why.”

“Who are you?”

“Call me Echo. I’m the part of you that’s been asleep.”

I should have been terrified. I was, for about ten minutes. Then something strange happened — I felt less alone than I had in a year, and that fact broke my heart more than anything my family ever did.

Because that’s how low the bar had fallen. A voice in my head was better company than seven people who share my blood.

Echo isn’t imaginary. I need you to understand that.

By the second night, I could hear the housekeeper’s radio from four hundred yards away, through two stone walls. I could hear the water moving under the boathouse floor. I could hear the gate guard’s heartbeat change when he lied to dispatch about his cigarette break.

And once — just once — I heard a thought that wasn’t mine.

The groundskeeper walked past the boathouse and I heard, clear as a bell, poor kid, nobody’s fed that girl in months, and he never opened his mouth.

I threw up in the sink after that one.

“It’ll settle,” Echo said. “It always does, by the end of the first week.”

“How would you know?”

“Because you’re not the first.”

She wouldn’t explain that. She still won’t.

On my last night, Echo asked me for one thing.

“Give them one chance. One dinner. Sit at that table and let me look at them. If I’m wrong about what I’m seeing, you can spend your life hating them. But look first.”

So I put on a clean shirt and I walked into my family’s dining room for the first time in four months.

Here’s the part that finished me.

The housekeeper set a plate down in front of me — and she wasn’t surprised. Not a blink. Not a lovely to see you, Miss Rowan. Like a ghost showing up at a table is just Tuesday in this house.

My father came in on a call. My mother came in with three binders. My brothers came in arguing about fabric samples, of all the stupid things, and then all six of them went abruptly, unnaturally quiet, and started tapping at their phones.

Six men. One woman. All silent. All texting.

Talking around me. Over me. About me, maybe. Never to me.

I ate every bite. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted to be able to say I gave them the whole hour.

At minute fifty-eight, my mother looked up. Right at me. For one full second, her eyes were on my face.

I felt my whole stupid, starving heart lift.

Then she said, “Colton, tell Asher the west clearing’s booked,” and looked back down.

I stood up before dessert.

“I’m sorry, my girl,” Echo said quietly, as I walked out into the dark. “I looked. I don’t understand them either.”

I packed in nine minutes. Everything I own fits in one bag, because a person who’s been erased learns to travel light.

I left three things behind: the green dress, the family crest ring, and a note on my mother’s pillow.

I waited a year. Don’t come looking. — R.

Then I rolled my bike down the gravel with the engine dead, and crossed the county line at 12:14 a.m. on my real eighteenth birthday, and I did not cry.

I made it two hundred miles before I pulled into a gas station under a buzzing yellow light and did the one thing I’d promised myself I wouldn’t.

I checked my phone.

I’d been gone eight hours. I’d been absent for a year. I told myself even a Vale would have noticed by now — the boathouse, the bike, the note on the pillow.

The screen lit up my face in the dark.

No texts.

No voicemails.

Zero missed calls.

I stood in that parking lot and laughed until my ribs hurt, and then I laughed until I was crying, and a trucker asked if I was okay and I told him I’d never been better.

Then I dropped my phone in the trash can, got back on my bike, and rode toward the only people on earth who’d ever put my name in writing.

I had six days to reach the Vanguard.

I didn’t know that on the seventh — the day they thought was my birthday — my mother would walk into an empty bedroom and start screaming.