Jenna spent the next forty-eight hours submerged in public archives, online court registries, and digital genealogy databases.
She did not attend school. She did not eat. She sat at the desk in her room, surrounded by printed articles, handwritten timelines, and empty mugs.
Every public record she accessed returned the same immutable, clinical facts:
Elias Vale. Born March 4, 1987. Disappeared October 18, 2005.
Yet she remembered him with an intimacy that defied logic.
She remembered the sound of his laugh—short, self-conscious, always catching in the back of his throat. She remembered the white crescent scar above his left eyebrow, earned when he fell from a tractor at age seven. She remembered his nervous habit of tapping his knuckles against wood in groups of three.
"How can you remember someone who disappeared before you were even old enough to remember your own birthday?" Dory asked, sitting on the edge of the unmade bed.
"I don't know," Jenna whispered, her eyes burning.
Her cracked phone buzzed on the desk.
A message from an unknown number appeared:
STOP LOOKING FOR ELIAS.
A second message flashed:
HE ISN'T REAL.
And then a third:
YOU CREATED HIM.
Jenna recoiled, knocking the phone onto the floorboards. "No," she gasped.
Dory picked it up, her brow furrowing. "Someone is spoofing your number, Jenna. Someone is trying to terrify you into silence."
Jenna looked up toward the full-length vanity mirror mounted on her wardrobe door.
Standing directly behind her reflection, his hands resting lightly on the shoulders of her reflected image, was Elias.
She spun around.
The room was empty. There was only Dory sitting on the mattress holding the phone.
Jenna turned back to the glass.
He was still there. His dark eyes stared into hers through the reflection, his face pale, his scarred brow furrowed in desperate urgency.
"You need to remember," he whispered.
The voice did not come from the mirror. It came from inside the bones of her skull.
"Remember what?" Jenna cried aloud, her voice cracking.
The reflected boy smiled—a sad, broken expression.
"That I'm not the one who disappeared, Jenna."
With a deafening crack, a jagged fracture tore through the mirror from top to bottom, bisecting the glass and scattering razor-sharp shards across the floorboards.
Jenna screamed, covering her face.
Dory leaped to her feet, dropping the phone, and rushed to grab Jenna's arms.
"Jenna! What happened?"
"He was in the glass!" Jenna sobbed, pointing at the shattered mirror. "He broke the mirror!"
Dory looked at the wardrobe door.
The mirror was not shattered. The silvered glass was smooth, unblemished, reflecting only the two girls standing in the center of the bedroom.
Dory looked at Jenna, her eyes filled with an unbearable, suffocating pity.
"Jenna…" Dory said softly, her voice shaking. "The mirror isn't broken."
Jenna reached out with trembling fingers and touched the glass. It was cool, smooth, and solid.
Yet even as she felt the smooth surface, she could still hear Elias's voice whispering in her head, steady, patient, and relentless.