Chapter 5: The Question Olivia Would Not Answer
I found Olivia in the home interior where the recording had begun, standing beneath the light-colored wall with her phone turned facedown in one hand. The screen was dark, but she kept touching the edge of it with her thumb, as if waiting for it to wake. I stopped several feet away. The distance felt deliberate. It was enough to keep the conversation from becoming a struggle, but not enough to let either of us pretend we were alone.
My mother was still unaccounted for. Olivia knew that. She also knew what I had heard on the call, or at least knew why the words had frightened me. Yet she had moved through the house as if the urgent thing was keeping the phone from ringing again.
I had repeated the evidence to myself until it lost its shape. I had heard only part of the phone call. I did not know who had been on the other end. I did not know what Olivia meant by making my mother disappear. I knew only that the phrase had reached me clearly enough to change the way I looked at every closed door.
I lifted my phone and opened the recording from earlier. The persistent text at the top of the frame read, “Day 2 of using AI filters on my.” Beneath it, my own face remained fixed in the light: glasses, dark shirt, eyes aimed straight at the camera. The image made my fear look organized. It was not.
I turned the screen toward Olivia.
“What phone call, Olivia?”
The question stayed between us. Olivia did not answer. Her eyes moved from my face to the phone and then toward the hallway. She placed her own phone on a nearby surface, but she did not step away from it. The motion looked like cooperation until I noticed that her fingers remained close enough to take it back.
I waited for her to correct me, to say that I had misunderstood, or to offer the missing part of the call. Instead, she looked past me at the blank stretch of wall where the overlay had appeared on my screen. Her silence was not proof of anything. It was still a refusal.
I lowered my phone. The room carried the small sounds of a house holding its breath: the faint hum of an appliance, the shift of fabric when Olivia moved her weight, the soft click of my phone case against my palm. I asked nothing else because there was nothing else I could ask without inventing what I did not know.
The contradiction became impossible to ignore. If the call meant nothing, Olivia could have helped me locate my mother. If my fear was only a mistake, she could have made the mistake smaller. Instead, she guarded the phone and watched the hallway, while my mother’s absence remained unexplained.
I stepped toward the interior doorway. Olivia moved at the same time, not blocking me completely, but changing the angle so that I would have to pass close to her. Her shoulder turned toward mine. The gesture was quiet and ordinary. It still felt like a decision.
I stopped before we touched. Behind her, the hallway remained empty. No footsteps came. No voice called my name. The explanation I needed was still somewhere beyond that silence, and Olivia was still standing between me and it.
May you like
Her phone lit briefly on the table.
Neither of us reached for it. The screen went dark again before I could see who had called.
