Chapter 1•
Absolutely. Chapter OThe red light on Noah’s camera blinked at me from across the living room, steady and patient, like it had all the time in the world.
I didn’t.
I sat forward on the couch, elbows on my knees, case file open in my lap even though I didn’t need it anymore. I knew Larry Coleman’s timeline by heart now.
Twenty years missing.
Last seen leaving a Christmas Eve service in the same coat his daughter still kept folded in a cedar chest because she swore if she let it go, she’d be letting him go too.
That shit stuck with me.
I looked into the lens.
“So that’s where we’re at,” I said, voice rough from too much gas station coffee and not enough sleep. “We went over the church records, the old volunteer lists, the woods behind the road where his truck was found, and the abandoned feed store his brother mentioned in the first interview. We didn’t get the answer his family deserves, not yet, but we did get enough to know the original search missed things. A lot of things.”
Noah lifted two fingers from behind the camera, circling them once.
Keep going.
I kept going.
“If any of you watching are from Marrow County, or you know anything about Larry Coleman’s movements the week before Christmas twenty years ago, email us. If you were there, if your parents were there, if you heard stories people laughed off because that’s what small towns do when they want ugly shit buried, send it.”
Derek leaned one shoulder against the wall behind the couch, all lazy confidence and camera awareness, like even exhaustion looked good on him. He crossed his tattooed arms over his chest and dipped his chin at just the right angle. He knew exactly where the lens was at all times. Always.
Jill, perched on the arm of the recliner beside me, tucked her blonde hair behind her ear and gave me the serious face she used for the channel. The one that made strangers think she spent her nights crying over cold cases instead of collecting phone numbers like concert merch.
Megan sat cross-legged on the rug with a pen in her hand and a notebook on her thigh. She was the only one who looked like exactly what she was. Tired. Real.
I drew in a breath.
“And if you’ve got a missing person case you want us to look at, leave it in the comments or send it through the page. We read all of them.”
That part was true. I read all of them. Even when I shouldn’t. Even when it left me up till four in the morning with burning eyes and a bag of stale chips in my lap, clicking through strangers who vanished between one ordinary second and the next.
I looked straight into the lens.
“This is Last Seen. I’m Tessa. That’s Noah, Derek, Jill, and Megan. We’ll update you if anything breaks on Larry Coleman. Until then, don’t stop saying his name.”
I held it for a second.
Noah said, “And cut.”
The room changed instantly.
It always did.
The serious energy went out of it like somebody had yanked a plug from the wall. Derek pushed off the paint-chipped wall with a stretch and muttered, “Jesus Christ, I’m starving,” before heading straight for the kitchen like he hadn’t spent the last ten minutes looking mournful and noble in the background of our outro.
Jill dropped her expression so fast it almost made me laugh.
“Oh my God,” she said, grabbing her phone off the coffee table. “If Hunter from the motel near Ashton texts me one more time asking if we made it back safe, I might actually marry him.”
“You don’t even know his last name,” Megan said, not looking up from her notebook.
“I know enough.”
“No, babe,” Derek called from the kitchen. “You know his jawline.”
“That too.”
Noah lowered the camera and flipped the little screen toward himself, already gone. Not mentally. Literally. The rest of us were still in the room and he was already inside the footage, scanning audio bars, checking framing, replaying my outro to make sure I didn’t look half-dead.
Which, to be fair, I probably did.
He frowned at the screen. “Your hair’s doing that thing again.”
I blinked at him. “What thing?”
He glanced up, pointed vaguely at my head. “The pissed-off crow nest thing.”
I touched the knot at the back of my dark hair and snorted. “That’s just my face after twelve hours in the car.”
“No,” Jill said, already typing on her phone. “Your face still looks cute. Your hair looks like it wants to kill someone.”
“Fair.”
Derek came back into the living room with half a loaf of bread, the peanut butter jar, and a spoon. No plate. No shame. “Anybody touching my food dies.”
“It’s not your food,” Megan said. “We all bought groceries.”
He dug a spoon into the jar. “Then anybody touching our food dies.”
“That doesn’t even sound right,” Noah muttered, not looking up.
“It sounds sexy, though,” Jill said.
“Everything sounds sexy to you,” Megan shot back.
Jill grinned. “That is because I choose joy.”
I leaned back against the couch cushions and watched them move around the room we’d all half taken over since signing the lease on this off-campus house last year. It had seemed smart at the time. Easier, we said. Easier to work cases. Easier to edit together. Easier to travel when all our shit was in one place and nobody had to coordinate from three dorms and two overpriced apartments.
It was easier.
Until it wasn’t.
The living room looked like what happened when college kids played detective for too long. Cases stacked in banker boxes under the side table. Camera batteries charging by the TV. Half-dead houseplants Megan kept trying to save. A map of Texas rolled in the corner from our last trip. Hoodies thrown over chairs. A pair of Derek’s boots by the front door that smelled like wet dirt and bad decisions.
Home, basically.
Noah crouched by the coffee table and rewound a clip. “The audio’s good.”
“Obviously,” Derek said around a mouthful of peanut butter. “I have a naturally gifted voice.”
“You sound like a guy who’d start a fight in a Buc-ee’s parking lot,” I said.
He pointed at me with the spoon. “And people would watch that video.”
“Sadly true,” Jill said.
Megan clicked her pen and started sorting the Larry Coleman notes into two piles. “I’m making one folder for usable interview material and one for dead-end leads. Tessa, before you disappear into your own head, tell me if you want the church records scanned tonight or tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” I said automatically.
She looked up at me. Really looked.
“You sure?”
No.
“Yeah.”
Megan held my gaze a second longer, then nodded once and went back to work. That was one of the things about her. She’d known me since kindergarten. Since missing front teeth and glitter glue and the time I bit a boy in second grade because he pulled my braid hard enough to make my eyes water. She could read the shift in me before I even named it.
Maybe before I felt it.
Noah stood and set the camera on the table. “I’m dumping the footage now. Don’t touch anything for, like, twenty minutes.”
Derek sucked peanut butter off the spoon. “If you cared about us, you’d edit tonight.”
“If you cared about me, you’d major in film and do it yourself.”
“I’d rather die.”
“Valid,” Jill said.
Noah rolled his eyes and disappeared down the hall toward his room with the camera.
Derek went back to the kitchen in search of more food.
Jill curled deeper into the recliner, smiling at her phone like one of the numbers from our last stop had just discovered poetry.
And Megan kept organizing.
Always Megan.
I sat there in the middle of all of it with Larry Coleman’s face staring up at me from the file in my lap. Black-and-white photo. Grainy. Smiling. One arm around a woman I assumed was his wife. Two kids in front of them in puffy winter coats, one missing a mitten and looking pissed about it.
A whole life in one picture.
Then gone.
Something in my chest pulled the way it always did after a case. Tight and sore and hollow all at once. We hadn’t solved Larry. We’d gotten close to things. Tugged at threads. Found cracks. But close wasn’t closure, and closure was the only thing I ever really wanted to hand people.
Not content.
Not views.
Not comments.
Answers.
The kitchen faucet turned on. Derek started digging through cabinets like we hadn’t been gone four days and he personally had to rediscover civilization.
Jill laughed softly at something on her phone.
Megan flipped a page in her notebook.
Normal house sounds.
But my mind had already slipped somewhere darker.
A woman walking through automatic grocery store doors with a purse on her shoulder and a list in her hand.
A cart.
Fluorescent lights.
Maybe she grabbed milk first. Maybe bread. Maybe eggs. Maybe she got distracted by a sale on cereal Tessa likes. Maybe she thought about dinner. Maybe she thought about getting home.
Maybe she never made it out of the parking lot.
I closed Larry’s file.
“Tess.”
I looked up.
Megan was watching me again.
“You want tea?”
That almost made me laugh. “You offer me tea like I’m eighty.”
“You act eighty when you get case-hungover.”
“I am not case-hungover.”
“You literally are.”
I tipped my head back against the couch. “I’m fine.”
“That’s girl code for not fine,” Jill said without looking up from her phone.
“Can everybody stop diagnosing me in my own living room?”
“No,” Derek yelled from the kitchen.
Megan smiled a little. “Tea’s still an option.”
Before I could answer, my phone buzzed where it sat beside me on the cushion.
Dad.
Just that. One word on the screen, and I felt something inside me soften and tighten at the same time.
I pushed up off the couch. “I’m taking this.”
Jill waggled her fingers at me. “Tell him I’m still his favorite.”
“He’s met you twice.”
“And he loved me both times.”
I headed for the back door before anyone could say anything else, pushing through the kitchen and past Derek, who now had peanut butter toast too because apparently the spoon alone hadn’t covered his emotional needs.
Outside, the night air hit cool against my face. The backyard light over the porch buzzed ugly and yellow, throwing shadows over the patchy grass and the crooked fence somebody had probably sworn was charming when they rented this place out.
I answered on the second ring.
“Hey.”
“Tessa-girl.”
His voice came warm and tired through the phone, and I shut my eyes for a second.
“Hey, Dad.”
“You make it home?”
“Couple hours ago.”
“You eat?”
I looked back through the kitchen window at Derek inhaling toast like a raccoon with gym membership money. “Define eat.”
He made a noise low in his throat. “You’re twenty years old and still answering questions like you’re trying to dodge prison time.”
“It’s a skill.”
“It’s irritating.”
I smiled despite myself and leaned a hip against the porch rail. “How are you?”
“Fine. House is still standing. Dog still hates the mailman. Same old shit.”
“Good.”
“You sound tired.”
“I am tired.”
“Case go anywhere?”
I looked out over the dark yard. Past the fence. Past the houses behind ours. Into nothing.
“Not enough.”
He was quiet a second.
“That one got to you?”
They all got to me.
Some just sank deeper.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You can stop, you know.”
I laughed once, no humor in it. “No, I can’t.”
“Tessa.”
His voice changed there. Softer. Careful.
The voice he used when both of us were standing near the shape of her without saying her name.
I rubbed my thumb against the porch rail, feeling chipped paint catch against my skin.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said. “I’ve known since the first video you posted.”
“It’s not that.”
“It is partly that.”
I didn’t answer.
Because it was partly that. It was always partly that.
Every missing flyer. Every cold case blog post. Every dead-end article from 2008 with a blurry photo and a woman’s height and weight listed under the last shirt she’d worn like that was enough to hold her in the world. Every time I looked at a family member on our channel trying so hard not to cry because they’d been doing it for years and it got embarrassing after a while, didn’t it, still hoping after a while, still saying a woman’s name after a while.
It was all her.
All the time.
My mother leaving to buy groceries and never coming back had built a second skeleton inside me. Everything I was hung on it.
Dad sighed. “You being mad at the world isn’t the worst thing. You being so damn determined you forget you’re flesh and blood, that’s what worries me.”
“That was weirdly poetic.”
“I’m getting older. It’s disgusting.”
I smiled again, this one real.
He took advantage of it. “You sleeping?”
"Sure.”
“You’re lying.”
“Sure.”
“You at least home a few days?”
I thought of the stack of unopened emails in my inbox. The comments. The case submissions. The files Megan had printed out before we left for Larry. The way my skin felt too tight after a case was done, like if I sat still too long I’d crawl out of it.
“Probably,” I said.
Another lie.
He knew it too.
“You be careful.”
“Dad.”
“I mean it.”
His voice roughened on the last word, and for one second I wasn’t twenty and standing on a back porch in a house full of people who sort of understood me. I was four and holding his hand too tight while uniforms moved through our kitchen and everybody kept saying my mom’s first name like saying it enough might summon her home.
I swallowed.
“I am careful.”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, rude.”
“Tessa.”
“I’ll be careful.”
That got me silence for a beat, like he was deciding whether to take what he could get.
Then, quieter, “I’m proud of you, baby girl. You know that, right?”
My throat went hot.
I hated when he did that. Said something good at the exact moment my guard was down enough for it to matter.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“You’re doing a thing most people talk about doing and then never do. That matters.”
“Still bullshit, though?”
“Mostly, yes.”
I let out a laugh, looked up at the starless black over the yard. “Go to bed.”
“You first.”
“Not likely.”
“Exactly my point.”
We said goodnight after that, but I stayed on the porch a minute longer with my phone in my hand and the night pressing close.
Inside, I could hear the muffled pulse of the house. Jill’s laugh. Derek opening and closing cupboards. Noah coming back down the hall. Megan saying something I couldn’t make out.
I should’ve gone in.
Should’ve showered, shoved something in my mouth, crashed face-first into bed, and let my brain cool off.
Instead I stood there thinking about my mother’s grocery run.
About Larry Coleman’s daughter still keeping his coat.
About how the world had an endless appetite for swallowing people and then acting confused when the ones left behind didn’t know how to keep living right.
When I finally went inside, the house had settled into its late-night shape.
Noah was back at the coffee table with his laptop open, footage importing.
Derek had upgraded from toast to microwaved pizza rolls.
Jill was on speakerphone in the corner talking soft and flirty to somebody named Brandon or Braden or maybe both.
Megan had finished the folders and stacked them in neat piles by my spot on the couch.
She glanced up when I came in. “Your tea got cold because you never answered me.”
I looked at the mug on the table.
She had made it anyway.
Something about that hit me right in the chest.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“Obviously.”
I sat, picked up the mug, took a sip, and made a face. “This tastes like leaves and disappointment.”
“It’s chamomile.”
“Exactly.”
Noah looked over his laptop. “You okay?”
There was something in his eyes when he asked it. More than casual. He always tried to hide it, but I saw it. Maybe because I saw too much. Maybe because he wasn’t as slick as he thought.
“Yeah,” I said.
He held my gaze half a second longer, then nodded and went back to his footage.
Derek dropped into the armchair opposite me with his plate balanced on his stomach. “So, what’s next?”
I blinked at him. “What?”
He gestured with a pizza roll. “Next case.”
Megan looked up. “Can she breathe first?”
“I’m just asking.”
Jill, still half on her phone, said, “Please let the next town have one decent bar and at least three emotionally unavailable men.”
“That’s your dream lineup?” I asked.
“That’s every town’s dream lineup.”
Noah snorted.
I set the tea down. “I haven’t looked yet.”
That was true.
But the second Derek said next case, something moved low under my ribs.
Not excitement.
Not exactly.
Need.
That ugly, familiar hum.
Noah shut his laptop halfway. “We could take a week.”
Derek looked offended. “For what? Reflection?”
“For sleep,” Noah shot back.
Megan pointed at him. “That. I vote sleep.”
Jill lifted a finger while murmuring into her phone, “I vote bar.”
I leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
A week.
Normal people took breaks.
Normal people let one case settle before picking up another.
Normal people knew how to exist without chasing ghosts.
My phone sat beside me on the couch, black screen, quiet for the moment. Emails waiting behind it. Messages. Files. Missing posters. Dead women. Maybe alive women. Mothers. Sisters. Daughters.
Somebody’s person.
Always somebody’s person.
Noah reopened his laptop. Derek kept eating. Jill kept flirting. Megan started labeling the folders in blocky neat handwriting.
I sat in the middle of all of it and felt the restless pull start up, low and mean.
By midnight, Jill had gone to her room. Derek had finally stopped eating long enough to disappear down the hall. Noah saved the footage and promised to rough-cut tomorrow. Megan made me swear I’d sleep before sunrise, which was adorable considering neither of us believed me.
Then it was just me in the dim living room with the TV off and the house creaking around me.
I gathered Larry Coleman’s file, stacked it on the coffee table, then picked it right back up again.
Put it down.
Picked up my phone.
Opened the case email.
Scrolled.
A woman missing from Oklahoma. Teen boy gone from a truck stop outside Waco. Unidentified remains in Louisiana. A twenty-three-year-old from Arkansas whose roommate swore the cops never took it seriously because she’d done coke twice and slept with the wrong man.
My jaw tightened.
I clicked another.
Then another.
The house went quiet in that deep after-midnight way, all pipes and settling wood and the faint hum of Noah’s hard drive through the wall.
I curled into the corner of the couch, one leg tucked under me, and kept scrolling.
My tea went cold.
My eyes burned.
I didn’t stop.
Because that was the thing nobody got, not really. Not Dad. Not Noah. Not even Megan, though she came closest.
Stopping felt like betrayal.
Stopping felt like being the kind of person who could look at a missing woman’s face and say somebody else will do it.
And somebody else never did.
At one-thirty, I finally dragged myself to my room.
I changed into a ratty T-shirt and sleep shorts, scrubbed my makeup off, twisted my hair up messy, climbed into bed.
Then I lay there in the dark staring at the ceiling while the little charging light on my phone glowed from the nightstand like an accusation.
My room smelled faintly like dry shampoo, old books, and the cheap vanilla candle Megan bought me last month because apparently my aura needed softening.
Didn’t work.
I rolled onto my side.
Closed my eyes.
Opened them again.
Somewhere down the hall Derek laughed at something on his phone. A minute later, silence.
I looked at the dark shape of my desk. The bulletin board above it. The pinned notes from cases we’d touched and cases I never quite let go of. Names. Dates. Places. Women with soft smiles and school portraits and DMV photos and cropped family snapshots where somebody’s arm was still around them from before.
My mother didn’t have a board.
Dad kept her pictures in frames because he said he wasn’t turning her into evidence.
I understood.
I also understood the part of me that wanted to map every second of her last day until the world cracked open and gave her back.
I threw an arm over my face.
Tried to breathe.
Tried to let the mattress hold me.
Didn’t work.
Because under the tiredness, under the ache in my shoulders from the drive, under the coffee and the disappointment and Dad’s voice still warm in my ear, that pull was there.
That horrible little click.
One case ending.
Another one waiting.
I dropped my arm, turned my head toward the nightstand, and looked at my phone glowing in the dark.
Then I reached for it.
And that was how the next one started.
