Chapter 40: Disappearing
Stephanie moved through her room like a ghost. The trembling had stopped, replaced by a cold, clear certainty that felt like glass in her veins. She didn’t reach for the silk robe or the soft leggings. Instead, she pulled on dark jeans, a thick cashmere sweater, and her warmest coat. She laced up her boots, wound a scarf around her neck, and pulled a beanie low over her ears. She stuffed her wallet and phone into her pocket. The phone buzzed once—a text from Veronica, probably—and she ignored it, the vibration feeling like a dying pulse against her thigh.
Downstairs, the silence was a held breath. She could feel their presence in the living room before she saw them. Her father stood by the fireplace, his back to the room, staring into the cold grate. Her mother was perched on the edge of a sofa, a crumpled tissue in her hand. The grand piano in the corner seemed to loom, a silent witness.
She paused in the foyer. The front door was ten feet away.
“Stephanie.” Her father’s voice cut through the quiet, not turning around. “Come in here. We need to talk.”
She didn’t answer. She looked at her mother, who met her gaze with red-rimmed eyes full of a helpless sorrow. Margot gave the slightest, almost imperceptible shake of her head—a warning, a plea.
It was all the confirmation Stephanie needed. There was no talking here. Not now. Maybe not ever.
She turned the heavy deadbolt. The click was deafening.
“Stephanie!” Charles roared, finally spinning around.
She yanked the door open and stepped out into the crisp morning air. She didn’t run. She walked, fast and purposeful, her boots hitting the sidewalk with a definitive click-clack that echoed the finality in her chest. She turned the corner and broke into a run only when she knew the house was out of sight, the cold air burning her lungs.
Back in the living room, chaos erupted.
“You just let her go?” Lucien’s voice was a low thunder. He’d arrived minutes after Stephanie fled, summoned by his mother’s frantic call. At twenty-six, he was the image of their father, but without the ice—his anger was a live wire.
“She made her choice,” Charles said, his voice dangerously calm. He poured a cognac, his hand steady. “She runs to that… girl. She will see what that life offers her. She will come back.”
“Are you insane?” Ryiel, ever the pragmatist at twenty-four, was already grabbing his own coat. “She’s nineteen, Papa. She’s upset and she’s alone in New York. She didn’t take a car. Where would she even go?”
“Veronica’s,” Charlotte said simply, pulling on her heels. She was the closest to Stephanie in age, at twenty-one, and her face was pale with fear. “That’s the only place. Lucien, drive.”
“No one is driving anywhere!” Charles slammed his glass down. The crystal stem snapped, sending amber liquid and shards across the mahogany table. “She defies me in my own home, she… she involves herself in perversion, and you want to reward her by chasing her?”
Margot finally spoke, her voice a broken whisper. “Charles, she is our child. Not a business deal. You cannot negotiate her safety.”
“Her safety is precisely why we left France!” he exploded, the carefully constructed façade cracking to reveal a raw, familiar terror beneath. “To protect her from corruption, from threats! And now it’s in her bed? Under my roof? I will not have it.”
The siblings exchanged a look. The unspoken history, the shadow they’d all lived with, filled the room. But it was a ghost. Stephanie on the streets was real.
“I’m going,” Lucien said, and it was a statement, not a request. Ryiel and Charlotte followed him out, the door closing softly behind them, a quieter rebellion than their sister’s.
Veronica’s dorm room was a shrine to organized ambition, and currently, a war zone of her own panic. She’d been pacing for an hour, phone clenched in her hand, waiting for a text, a call, anything.
The pounding on her door made her jump.
She yanked it open to find Stephanie’s three siblings crowding the hallway. Lucien’s expression was grim.
“Is she here?” Charlotte asked, peering past her.
Veronica’s heart dropped. “No. I thought… I thought she was with you. She hasn’t answered my texts.”
“She ran,” Ryiel said flatly. “Bailed out the front door. We assumed she came to you.”
“She didn’t.” The words tasted like ash. Veronica grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair, her mind racing through a map of the city. “Where has she gone? Did she have money?”
“Her wallet, her phone. That’s it,” Lucien said. “You have no idea? No favorite place she goes when she’s upset?”
A memory flashed: Stephanie at sixteen, hiding from some social embarrassment, finding solace not in a place, but in a feeling of anonymity. “I just get on the subway, ‘Roni,” she’d said. “I pick a line and I ride to the end. Nobody knows me. Nobody looks at me.”
“The subway,” Veronica breathed, already moving past them into the hall. “She likes to disappear on the train.”
Stephanie had gotten off at Canal Street. The dense, chaotic crush of people in Chinatown was a kind of shelter. She walked, head down, past stalls of pungent fish and bins of loose tea, the voices a cacophonous blend of languages that drowned out her own thoughts. She bought a baozi with cash, but couldn’t stomach it after one bite.
The numbness was wearing off. The image of her father’s face, the sound of Veronica being ordered out, began to replay. Each loop sharpened the pain, honing it into a sharp edge that cut her from the inside. She felt exposed, the secret core of her ripped out and left to wither in the cold air.
She found a bench in a tiny, grimy pocket park. An old man fed pigeons. A couple argued in rapid-fire Mandarin. She pulled out her phone. Dozens of missed calls: Maman, Charlotte, Lucien. Ryiel. Three from Veronica.
She opened Veronica’s last text, sent forty minutes ago: “Where are you? Just tell me you’re safe. Please.”
Her thumbs hovered over the keyboard. The urge to type “I’m safe” was overwhelming. But it was a lie. She wasn’t safe. She was untethered, a balloon cut loose, and the sky was suddenly a terrifying, endless expanse.
She didn’t write back. She turned the phone off. The screen went black, reflecting her own hollow eyes.
Veronica split from the siblings. “You take the Upper East Side, check the parks, the museum steps,” she instructed Lucien, her lawyer-voice taking over despite the fear. “I’ll head downtown. She hates the cold, she’ll seek shelter somewhere.”
She took the 6 train downtown, her eyes scanning every platform, every car. She got out at Spring Street and walked, her long legs eating up the blocks. She checked coffee shops, bookstores, the public library branch. Nothing.
Her own phone buzzed. Her father, Jace.
“Mum told me. Family drama is one ting. A missing girl is another. You find her yet?”
“Not yet, Daddy.”
“You check where the lost souls go? Not where the money is.”
He was right. She thought of Stephanie’s inherent gentleness, her aversion to conflict. She wouldn’t go to a bar. She’d seek somewhere quiet, somewhere she could fade away.
The little park. There was a hideous little concrete park near the courthouse where Veronica sometimes ate lunch, full of people who wanted to be unseen.
She started running.
The grey afternoon was bleeding into an early, dusky evening. The cold was sinking into Stephanie’s bones. The old man had left. The arguing couple was gone. She was alone on the bench, watching the streetlights sputter on, one by one.
The happiness of the morning felt like a story she’d read about someone else. A cruel, beautiful fairy tale. This was the reality: the chill, the grinding fear, the vast, crushing understanding that her life had just fractured into a before and an after, and she had no idea how to live in the after.
A shadow fell across her lap.
She looked up.
Veronica stood there, chest heaving from running, her breath pluming in the cold air. Her green eyes were wide with fear, and relief, and a furious, blazing love.
For a long moment, they just stared. The city’s noise faded to a distant hum.
Veronica slowly knelt on the damp concrete in front of the bench, bringing her eyes level with Stephanie’s. She didn’t touch her. Not yet.
“Hey,” Veronica said, her voice rough.
Stephanie’s chin trembled. A single, hot tear broke free and traced a path through the city grime on her cheek. It was the first crack in the dam.
Veronica saw it. She reached out, her thumb gently catching the tear. Her hand was warm against Stephanie’s cold skin.
“Come on,” Veronica whispered, her Patwa softening the edges of the words. “Let’s go home.”
Stephanie shook her head, a desperate, tiny movement. “I don’t have one.”
“Yes,” Veronica said, her voice firm now, leaving no room for argument. She stood, taking Stephanie’s icy hands and pulling her gently to her feet. “You do.”