I Stopped Talking and They All Regretted It Chapter 04

I Stopped Talking and They All Regretted It Chapter 04

That first night, I sent forty-two messages.

Not one reply.

By the next morning, my battery was down to twenty percent.

I didn’t dare call anymore, so I just pinged my location once an hour.

[Mom, I’m still here.]

[Theodore, the rain stopped, but the water’s getting deeper.]

[Coach Hayes, I didn’t wander off on purpose. I really can’t get back.]

[Charlotte, if you’re still mad, I’m sorry.]

Every single one got a red exclamation mark.

Only the ones to Charlotte ever went through.

She never wrote back again, though.

At noon, the Sinclairs were gathered at the Medina estate, celebrating with Charlotte over how well the outdoor trip had gone.

Mom noticed the empty seat at the long table and asked, offhand:

“Emma’s still not back?”

Theodore, slicing Charlotte a piece of cake, answered without looking up.

“Probably holed up at some friend’s place. Forget about her. She’s just trying to force us to cut the isolation short.”

Mom hesitated.

“But she hasn’t come back since yesterday.”

Charlotte’s eyes reddened instantly.

“Mom, do you regret taking my side? Emma knows so many people, somebody’s always looking out for her wherever she goes. How could anything actually happen to her?”

“I’m the one who’s only ever had you two.”

Mom pulled her straight into a hug.

“Mom’s not blaming you, sweetheart. Emma just grew up with nobody keeping her in check, that’s why she’s like this. This time, she needs to learn where the line is.”

I had no idea they were eating cake right then.

I was holding my phone up, recording message number seventy-three for Mom.

“Mom, I’m a little cold.”

“You don’t have to write much back. Even just one emoji would do.”

“I just want to know you can still hear from me.”

Failed to send.

I deleted the video and recorded it over again.

The second take, my smile came out more natural.

“It’s fine, I was just messing with you.”

“I’m tough against the cold, anyway. The heat broke one winter at the shelter, and I still managed to talk the whole night through with the kid in the next bed.”

Battery down to ten percent.

I couldn’t bring myself to send it.

The next afternoon, Cooper was cleaning out the bus and found my shredded friend notebook wedged in the back row.

He spent a full hour piecing the scattered pages back together.

Eventually he reached the page with his own name on it.

[Cooper — bad lower back, can’t lift anything heavy.]

[Daughter works in Chicago. Remind him to call her on the 15th every month.]

[If the outdoor trip ever comes up short a person, he’ll recount at least three times.]

Cooper stared at that last line, and his face changed on the spot.

He stormed straight into the Northridge program office.

“How many people actually made it back from Fort Worden yesterday?”

Coach Hayes blinked, caught flat-footed.

“Everyone came back.”

“Did you count them yourself?”

“Charlotte said Emma took a different van.”

Cooper slammed a hand down on the desk.

“I’ve driven this school bus for fifteen years. You think I don’t know which kid climbs onto which vehicle?”

The program pulled the security footage from the parking area and trailhead right away.

In the footage, every camper followed their group onto the open red and yellow trails.

Every camper but me. I had the blue card on my backpack and walked straight toward a trail sealed off with a chain.

Coach Hayes’s face went white on the spot.

That blue card had been decommissioned a decade ago.

The trail dead-ended at a sealed underground tunnel beneath an old coastal gun battery.

By the time the program got around to notifying the family, the 72-hour countdown had ten minutes left.

Back at the Sinclairs’ living room, Mom’s phone kept buzzing.

She picked it up, frowning.

“Who’s calling this late?”

A few sentences in from the other end, the glass in her hand slipped and hit the carpet.

Theodore shot to his feet.

“What happened?”

Mom’s lips trembled.

“The program says Emma’s been missing for two days.”

All the color drained out of Charlotte’s face at once.

Theodore, though, forced himself calm fast.

“That’s impossible.”

“She’s definitely just hiding out somewhere. Emma can turn a total stranger into a friend inside five minutes. There’s no way she’d actually go missing.”

The second he finished, the countdown hit zero.

The blanket communication block Theodore had ordered the program’s tech guy to set up expired automatically.

Mom’s phone was the first to go haywire.

Forty-two messages.

Seventy-three.

Ninety-nine.

Every distress message the system had been holding back flooded onto her screen at once.

Then came Theodore’s, Coach Hayes’s, the program director’s, and every last camper’s phone.

Missed calls, videos, location pins, stacking up on every single device.

Theodore’s face turned ashen as he opened the last voice message.

It sat silent for a long stretch.

Then my voice came through, faint and thin.

“Theodore, I don’t think I can get out of here.”

“But you were right. Nobody paying attention to me for once really doesn’t kill you.”

“I’m just a little scared.”

“If I don’t make it back this time, don’t be mad at anybody.”

“I’ve already learned not to bother people.”

“From now on… I won’t be a pain to any of you again.”

The message ended.

Nobody in the living room dared make a sound.

A screech of brakes cut through the quiet outside.

Cooper burst in with a couple of officers from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office and slammed the blue route card down in front of Charlotte.

“Who pinned this to her backpack?”

Charlotte stumbled backward.

Just as Theodore opened his mouth, an officer’s phone rang.

His face changed the moment he answered.

“We’ve got her last location.”

“About fifty feet underground, at the old gun battery.”

“Rescue equipment isn’t picking up any response yet.”

…