Surprisingly, she does...

Owen heard plastic rustling. Footsteps, two sets, moving away. Paige’s heels clicked then steadied into a smooth, obedient rhythm as she seemed to follow him out of frame.

He screamed her name into the phone. “Paige! Paige! Answer me! What the fuck is going on? Paige!”

No response. Just the fading echo of footsteps and distant street noise.

The call didn’t drop. The screen stayed live, showing an empty stretch of sidewalk, a crushed receipt fluttering past the lens.

Owen kept yelling until his throat burned.

The screen finally went black an hour later.

He sat there in the dark living room, phone clutched so hard the case creaked, staring at nothing.

Heart hammering.

Mind blank except for one looping image: that tiny strip of tape stuck to her forehead, the way her eyes had gone empty in half a second.

He didn’t know what it said. Had the man somehow **** her?

He didn’t know what the fuck had just happened.

Owen barely slept that night. He’d kept trying to video call her long after the screen went black, volume cranked, hoping against everything that Paige’s face would pop back into frame. That she’d laugh it off, say some asshole had pranked her, that she was fine. The call stayed dead. Hours dragged. At some point the battery on her end must have died because the dial failed completely, leaving him staring at a frozen error message.

He booked the first flight out at 4 a.m., red-eye to Austin, no checked bag, just his wallet, charger and the clothes on his back. The whole flight he replayed the clip in his head: her eyes glazing over, the phone clattering, those footsteps fading. He had no answers.

By the time he landed it was mid-morning. He took a cab straight to the nearest precinct to her hotel; a random erby had picked up Paige’s phone from the sidewalk. The guy had been decent, dropping it off at the police station.

Now Owen sat in the waiting area of the Austin PD’s downtown station, chair creaking under him, leg bouncing hard enough to rattle the row. A desk sergeant had taken his statement an hour ago, listened to the whole thing with half-lidded eyes, then asked him to go over his story again. Owen had obliged, watching the sergeant’s face go from bored to skeptical to outright amused.

“So let me get this straight,” the cop had said, leaning back. “Your girlfriend’s on a video call, some kid bumps into her, sticks what looks like tape on her head, and she just… drops the phone and walks off with him? No struggle, no screaming after that first bit?”

Owen had nodded, throat tight. “She went blank. Like she’d been ****. I heard him tell her to carry his bags. She just did it.”

The sergeant had rubbed his jaw, glanced at his partner. “Look, kid. People run off sometimes. Especially on business trips. Maybe she met someone, got cold feet about your relationship. Happens more than you’d think.”

“She didn’t run off,” Owen snapped. “She loves me. We were planning the wedding next year. She was on her way to a fucking meeting.”

The partner had shrugged. “No signs of foul play on the video. No blood, no weapon. She walked away under her own power. We can file a missing persons, put out a description, but without evidence of a crime…” He trailed off, handed Owen a form. “Fill this out. We’ll circulate it. But honestly? Nine times out of ten, they come back when they’re ready.”

Owen hadn’t filled it out. He’d just sat there, staring at the floor, feeling the room spin slower and slower. Sixteen hours since he’d last heard her voice. Sixteen hours of silence.

Then it hit him.

The satchel.

During the call she’d had it slung over her shoulder, the black leather one he’d bought her for her birthday last year. Expensive. Sleek. And inside the lining, tucked in a secret pocket she’d shown him once with a wink, was an AirTag. “Just in case some dickhead tries to snatch it” she’d said. “Or if I leave it in an Uber again.”

His hands shook as he pulled out her phone, the one the erby had turned in. It still had a small charge, the code the same as always. He opened the Find My app, logged in with her Apple ID. The little green dot blinked to life.

Active.