THREE MONTHS MISSING
A Sentinel Trilogy Story
By Brian Bullock
A Starborne Studios Production
EVERYONE KNOWS / X @EveryoneKnws1
Barbara Matthews hadn't slept through the night since September.
She'd tried everything — warm milk, herbal tea, the sleeping pills her doctor prescribed that made her feel like she was walking through chest-deep water. Nothing worked. Every night around two in the morning she'd wake with a start, heart loud in the dark, reaching for her phone to check for messages that never came.
Three months. Ninety-two days since Bron had called to say he was going camping. Ninety-two days since she'd heard his voice, heard him say Love you, Mom the way he always did at the end of their conversations — casual, almost embarrassed, but always there. He'd never once missed it. Not since he was seventeen and had started saying it without being asked.
She had always thought of herself as a practical woman. Rancher's daughter, rancher's wife for twenty-two years, mother of two sons she'd largely raised alone after Frank left — not because she'd failed at anything but because Frank had been the kind of man whose restlessness eventually outran his commitments, and she'd made peace with that years ago. She did not catastrophize. She did not borrow trouble. She had the Montana disposition toward silence and forward motion that came from growing up in a place where the winter was long and the land was hard and you did what needed doing without spending too much time on how you felt about it.
Ninety-two days had tested that disposition to its foundation.
Ninety-two days of nothing.
She sat at the kitchen table now, a cold cup of coffee in front of her, watching the December light push through the curtains. The house felt wrong in a way it hadn't even after Frank left. Frank's absence had been a different kind of wound — sharp and clean, the kind you could name and eventually learn to carry. His chair at the table still felt like his chair, but it was a memory, a closed thing. This was different. This was waiting. Not knowing. The specific cruelty of a silence that might mean anything — and every morning she woke and reached for her phone and the silence was still there, unchanged, ninety-one days becoming ninety-two becoming ninety-three, and she got up and made coffee and kept going because that was what you did, even when the going felt like walking through a house where every room had something missing and you couldn't stop noticing.
Her phone buzzed. Derek.
Call me when you're up. Found something.
Barbara dialed before she could think.
"Derek? What is it? Did you find—"
"Mom. Breathe." Her older son's voice was steady, the way it always was in a crisis — he'd gotten that from his father, the ability to go still when everything else was falling apart. "I didn't find Bron. But I found something. I'm coming over."
"What kind of something?"
A pause. The careful kind.
"Something that doesn't make sense. Thirty minutes."
* * *
Derek looked terrible.
He stood on her porch with dark circles under his eyes and a beard that had gone past deliberate into neglect, holding a paper bag like it contained something fragile. Or dangerous. Possibly both. He had always been the careful one — the one who planned, who analyzed, who brought systems down to their components and understood how they worked before he touched them. Bron had been the one who acted on instinct; Derek was the one who made sure the instinct was right. She had watched him, over the past three months, applying that same methodical thoroughness to the problem of his brother's disappearance, and she had watched it costing him.
"When's the last time you slept?" she asked, stepping aside to let him in.
"I could ask you the same thing."
They sat at the kitchen table — the same table where she'd fed them a thousand dinners, where Bron and Derek had done homework and argued and grown up, where Frank had read the paper every morning until the morning he didn't come home. She had sat at this table more hours than she could count in the last ninety-two days. It had become the place she came back to, the fixed point, the thing that didn't change when everything else had stopped making sense.
Barbara made fresh coffee because she needed something to do with her hands.
"You went back to the site," she said. Not a question. She'd known he would — had known it since the official report came back with its careful language about voluntary disappearance and its complete absence of explanation for the glassy crater and the footprints that ended in mid-stride. Derek did not accept inconclusive as a final answer.
Derek set the bag on the table but didn't open it. "I used my contacts. Got access to places I wasn't supposed to be." He'd been an engineer for ten years, and he knew how to find things that didn’t want to be found. "The official report says his truck was abandoned on a forest service road. Keys in the ignition, no signs of struggle. They classified it as voluntary disappearance."
"Bron wouldn't—"
"I know." Derek rubbed his eyes. The gesture was the gesture of a man who had been running on almost nothing for weeks, who had been holding himself together by the same force of will he'd applied to every difficult problem, and who was beginning to understand that some problems didn't yield to force of will. "His account hasn't moved in three months. His phone has been off since the day he left. The voluntary disappearance classification exists to close files, not to explain anything." He was quiet for a moment. "So I went up there. To the site. What was left of it."
He reached into the bag and pulled out something wrapped in cloth. Set it on the table between them. Unwrapped it slowly, with the care of someone handling something they didn't fully understand.
Barbara stared.
A fragment of metal — curved, like a piece of something larger, no bigger than a silver dollar. But the surface was wrong. It caught the kitchen light and seemed to move, colors rippling across it that she had no names for. Not iridescent. Not rainbow. Something else entirely. Something that made her eyes want to slide away from it, the way they slid away from a thing that existed at an angle to the things she normally saw.
"The soil at the site was fused," Derek said quietly. "Turned to glass from heat. The federal agents had taken everything they could reach, but they missed the outer edge. I found this in the dirt just beyond the perimeter."
Barbara reached out slowly, drawn to it despite the part of her that said don't.
It was warm under her fingers. Warmer than the room, warmer than her hand. And there was something else — a vibration so faint it was barely there at all, a hum that traveled up through her fingertips and settled somewhere behind her eyes like a word she almost recognized.
She pulled her hand back.
"What is it?"
"I don't know." Derek's voice was hollow. "I took it to three labs. The first said the molecular structure doesn't match any known element — called it a fabrication, sent me away. He wasn't unkind about it. He just couldn't process it." He looked at the fragment. "The second accused me of a hoax. I got angry. That didn't help. The third kept it for twelve hours, and I thought — I thought maybe that was it, maybe they were running it through every test they had, maybe they would call and give me a category to put it in." He paused. "They called to say their equipment kept failing every time they tried to run a test. They gave it back and asked me not to contact them again."
Barbara looked at the fragment. The colors shifted slowly in the kitchen light.
"You think it's connected to Bron," she said.
"I think something came down in those woods. Something that left a crater and fused the soil and left this behind. And I think Bron was there when it happened." Derek slid the wrapped fragment across the table toward her. "Keep it. It's the only physical proof that any of this is real."
Barbara picked it up. Even through the cloth she could feel the warmth, the impossible hum.
"He's alive," she said.
Derek looked at her. "Mom—"
"I know how it sounds."
He was quiet.
She had not expected that. She’d expected him to push back — to find the logical objection, the alternative hypothesis, the reason the knowing wasn’t enough. That was Derek. That he was quiet told her that the engineer in him had run out of objections, and what was left was just her son sitting across a kitchen table believing the same thing she believed.
"I know how it sounds," she said again, quieter. "I have been saying it to myself every day for three months, the way you test something to see if it holds. I know how it sounds. And then I think about every week for sixteen years, and his voice on the phone, and the fact that his bank account hasn't moved, and—" She stopped. "It holds. Every time I test it. It holds."
Derek was quiet for a long moment.
She watched him run it through — the engineer in him, the part that required evidence, the part that had just spent three months applying reason and rigor to a problem that kept dissolving every framework he brought to it. He had their father's jaw and her mother's stubbornness, and he had built a career out of understanding systems that other people found incomprehensible, and she had watched him over the past three months encountering, for the first time in his adult life, a system he could not get his hands around.
She watched him arrive at the same place she'd arrived at months ago, in the first week, standing in this kitchen at two in the morning with her phone in her hand: reason had its limits, and beyond those limits was what you knew about the people you loved, and what she knew about Bron was that he was not gone. The knowing was not evidence. It didn't need to be.
Something in Derek's face shifted. Not hope, exactly. Something older and quieter than hope — the thing that came after you had tested something and found it held.
"The people who took over the scene," he finally said. "They're not just investigating. They sealed the area, classified the reports, and—" He paused. "They're watching us, Mom."
"Watching who?"
He met her eyes.
"Us. Both of us. Anyone who might keep looking."
* * *
After Derek left, she sat at the table for a long time.
The fragment was in front of her. She had gotten into the habit of that during the first week after Derek brought it — setting it out when she needed to think, the way you put a photograph on your desk when you needed to remember who you were working for. She looked at it now in the afternoon light coming through the kitchen window, the colors shifting in their slow, inexplicable way — not iridescent, not any category she had, just wrong in a way her eyes acknowledged before her mind did — and she thought about the three labs and what they had told her, and what that meant.
The molecular structure doesn't match any known element. She turned this over. Not a hoax, not a fabrication — Derek was an engineer, he understood the difference between something he'd made and something he'd found, and he did not lie to her. Not a known element. Something from outside the catalog.
She had grown up in Montana. She had ranched and hunted and raised two boys and built a life from the ordinary materials of a life in a hard place, and she was not, by disposition, someone who reached for extraordinary explanations. She reached for ordinary ones first, and tested them, and only when they ran out did she move on.
The ordinary explanations had all run out.
She had been raised to mistrust conclusions that couldn’t be tested. Her father had ranched by evidence — soil and rainfall and the weight of an animal on a scale. Her husband had fixed engines by what the gauges showed. She had raised her sons the same way. She did not arrive at the edge of what she could explain and feel comfortable there. But she arrived honestly, which was the only way she knew how to arrive anywhere.
She reached out and touched the fragment. The warmth moved up through her fingers. The hum settled behind her eyes like a word on the edge of recognition.
She thought about Bron. About the specific quality of his voice on the phone, how she could always tell within the first two sentences what kind of day he was having. About the way he'd sounded on the last call — not troubled, not afraid. Something else. Something she had registered at the time as energy, as forward motion, and had not thought about again until now.
He had known. He had always known more than he said, her younger son — kept things inside himself until he'd worked them through, and then told you the conclusion rather than the process. Whatever he'd walked toward in those woods, whatever had brought the shape in the sky to a clearing in his own county, he had known about it. She could hear it now, looking back at the call — the energy in his voice was not restlessness, not anxiety. It was preparation. He had been ready. He had walked toward it with the stride of a man who had made up his mind, and she had not known what he was making up his mind about, but she understood the quality of it now.
* * *
She noticed the car three days later.
Gray sedan, end of the street. Present in the morning when she opened her curtains, still there when she closed them at night. The driver — a man in a dark jacket — never left the vehicle. Never appeared to do anything but watch.
Next day, different car. Different driver. Same position.
Barbara had grown up in Montana. She had ranched with her father and hunted with her husband and raised two sons in a county where everyone knew everyone and a strange car parked on a residential street stood out the way a wrong note stood out in a familiar song. She had never in sixty-one years of living here needed to know what federal surveillance looked like. She knew it now.
She gave it a day. She wanted to be sure she was reading it right before she reacted to it, because she was a woman who had spent her life not reacting to things until she was certain she understood them. She watched the car from her bedroom window the second morning with her coffee going cold in her hands. Watched the rotation — the handoff that happened precisely every eight hours, the replacement vehicle pulling up to the same position with the same professional stillness.
On the fourth morning she walked to the end of her driveway with her coffee mug.
The current watcher was a woman in her thirties, forgettable face, professional eyes — the specific blankness of someone trained to be unobtrusive. Barbara looked directly at her and held the look until the woman looked away first.
Then she went inside and called Derek.
"They're watching me too," he said before she could speak. "Van outside my apartment. They rotate every eight hours."
"I noticed." She kept her voice even. "What do they think we're going to do?"
"Find something, maybe. Or they're waiting to see if someone contacts us."
If Bron contacts us, she thought but didn't say.
She hung up and stood at her kitchen window watching the gray sedan and felt something she hadn't expected — not just fear, not just grief, but something harder and cleaner underneath both of them. An anger that was useful. The cold, focused kind, the kind that didn't burn itself out but turned into fuel.
They were watching her house. They had tapped her phone — she'd noticed the delay on the line since Tuesday, the slight click before the dial tone. They had classified the file on her son's disappearance at a level she couldn't reach and closed the case and told her to stop looking. They had sent men in dark suits and women with professional eyes to sit at the end of her street and watch her grieve.
Somebody knew something. Nobody deployed this kind of operation to cover up a simple disappearance.
Barbara pulled the fragment from her robe pocket and unwrapped it.
The colors shifted in the winter light. The warmth pulsed against her palm.
Fine. Let them watch.
She went back to the kitchen table and pulled the legal pad out of the drawer beneath it — the same drawer where she kept the household accounts, the receipts, the lists she made when she needed to think — and uncapped a pen and wrote at the top of the page: What I know. What I can prove. What I do next. Three columns. She had been a rancher’s daughter. She knew how to work a problem.
* * *
She went to the Choteau Acantha herself, without telling Derek.
That was important to her — doing it herself, not because she needed permission or backup, but because this was her son and her choice and she was tired of being someone things happened to. She had spent three months waiting and grieving and letting other people decide what was possible. She was done with that.
The Acantha's offices were four blocks from the department, in a building that had housed the paper for forty years. Barbara had read it her whole adult life — had read the notices of births and deaths and the coverage of weather events and county commission decisions, the texture of a small town's ongoing record of itself. She had placed the notice of Frank's father's death in its pages. She had read the announcement of Bron's high school graduation in its pages.
She was going to put her son's name in it again.
The reporter was young — barely older than Bron, which hit her in a way she hadn't prepared for, sitting across a desk from someone her son's age who still had the forward momentum of a life going well. Her name was Jenny. She had earnest eyes and a recorder she kept adjusting, and she had the look of someone who had expected to spend her career covering county fairs and city council meetings and was still deciding how she felt about something larger arriving on her desk.
Barbara laid out everything she had — phone records, bank statements, the police report with its careful language about voluntary disappearance, a photograph of Bron from her birthday dinner last spring. His bank account untouched for ninety-two days. His credit cards dark. A man who had called his mother every week without fail, who had said love you, Mom at the end of every call since he was seventeen, gone without a word.
"And you're certain there's no other explanation?" Jenny asked carefully. "A new start somewhere, maybe — some people do just—"
"My son calls me every week," Barbara said. "He has called me every week since he was nineteen years old and moved out of this house. He has never, in sixteen years, missed a call without warning me first. Not once." She kept her voice level. The anger was still there, the cold useful kind, but this wasn't the moment for it. "He is not starting a new life somewhere. Something happened to him. Something that the people who were called to investigate chose to classify and close rather than answer. I need someone to say that out loud where people can hear it."
Jenny looked at her for a long moment. She had stopped adjusting the recorder.
Then she looked at the folder, with the photograph on top — Bron at her birthday dinner, grinning, holding a piece of cake. A man who had his father's jaw and her eyes and thirty-five years of being known by the woman across the desk.
"I'll see what I can do," Jenny said.
Barbara nodded and gathered her folder and drove home past the gray sedan at the end of her street without looking at it.
* * *
The article ran five days later.
She had been making the coffee when it hit the doorstep and she'd seen the paper on the porch and gone out barefoot in the December cold to get it before she'd even thought about it. Page six. LOCAL MOTHER SEEKS ANSWERS IN SON'S DISAPPEARANCE. Jenny had written it carefully — the facts, the timeline, the phone records, the bank account sitting still for ninety-two days. A photograph of Bron from his birthday dinner, his father's jaw and her eyes, grinning at something off-camera. A quote from Barbara that she'd given and approved: My son calls every week. He has never missed a call. Something happened to him, and I am asking anyone who has information to come forward.
She bought ten copies and sent one to Derek and kept one on the table next to the fragment and stacked the rest in the corner of the living room.
The public response was silence. No tips. No calls from strangers who'd seen anything. The community she'd lived in her whole life, which she had always trusted to notice things, had not noticed anything. Or they had and they weren't saying. She couldn't tell the difference.
The other response was immediate.
Her phone developed a soft click at the start of every call — a tiny delay before the dial tone, faint enough to be ignorable if you weren't paying attention. Barbara had been paying attention to everything for three months. She noticed it on the first day.
The cars multiplied. Two, then three, at different points along her street.
Then Sergeant Peters called.
Not a name she recognized. That was the first thing. Twenty-three years in this county — she knew Hale, she knew Whitmore, she knew the dispatcher who sometimes answered on weeknight evenings. She did not know a Sergeant Peters.
"Mrs. Matthews, this is Sergeant Peters from the department. We wanted to follow up regarding the article—"
"Has there been a development?" Barbara asked.
"No, ma'am. We wanted to advise you that publicizing missing persons cases can sometimes attract unwanted attention. Scammers, people who take advantage of grieving families—"
She let him finish the sentence because she was a person who listened before she responded.
"Sergeant Peters." Her voice came out quiet and absolutely flat. "I was born in Teton County. I have lived here my entire life. I know every deputy in this department by name, and I know what follow-up calls from the sheriff's office sound like because I have received them before, years ago, when my husband didn't come home on time and I called to report it." She paused. "This is not that call. If you have information about my son, I would like to hear it. If you don't, I would like you to stop calling."
Silence on the line. The soft click she'd been hearing for days.
"We'd also recommend you refrain from independent investigation," he said finally. "For your own safety."
"Thank you for your concern," Barbara said, and hung up.
She sat at the kitchen table for a moment with her hands flat on the surface.
For your own safety.* Not a threat. Too professional for a direct threat. But the architecture of the warning was clear enough — the same architecture she'd recognized in the cars at the end of her street, in the click on the phone line, in the sealed file and the classified report. *Stop looking. This is not for you.
She felt the anger settle into something more useful than anger. Something cold and patient and entirely focused.
They were afraid of what she might find. Good. That meant there was something to find.
* * *
That night she stood at her bedroom window in the dark and looked at the moon.
She had looked at that moon her whole life — from her father's ranch, from the porch of this house, from the hospital the night each of her sons was born — and had never once thought of it as a place. A destination. Somewhere something could be. It had always been a fixture, part of the background, as permanent and irrelevant as the wallpaper. She looked at it the way she’d looked at the moon all her life and never seen it.
She thought about what Derek had said when he left. He'd stood on the porch with the paper bag that was now empty, the fragment having moved to her robe pocket where she could feel its warmth against her hip, and he'd looked at the gray sedan at the end of the street and then at her, and he'd said: They're watching because they know something came down out of there. And if something came down and took him, that means something took him somewhere. He'd said it quietly, the way he said hard things — not avoiding the weight of them, just keeping his voice even. That means he went somewhere. That's different from gone.
It was different from gone.
The fragment was warm in her hand. She'd taken it out of her pocket without thinking about it, the way you took out your phone when you needed grounding, when you needed something solid. The hum moved up through her fingers the way it always did, settling somewhere behind her eyes like a word she almost knew.
"Where are you?" she asked the moon. Asked Bron. Asked whatever had made the fragment and left it in the dirt at the edge of a fused glass circle in a Montana forest. "Where did you take him?"
No answer came.
But standing there in the dark with the fragment warm in her palm and the watchers in their cars at the end of her street and ninety-two days of silence behind her, Barbara Matthews felt something shift in her chest. Not hope exactly. Hope was contingent, breakable, dependent on outcomes she couldn't control. This was different.
Certainty.
Her son was alive. She had no proof beyond a piece of impossible metal and thirty-five years of knowing him, and she didn't need more. She knew the way she had known when he was seventeen and lying about where he'd been — not from evidence, just from the specific quality of his voice, from the thirty-five years of paying attention that she had invested in knowing this particular human being. She knew the way she had known the week before Frank left that he was already gone — not because he'd told her, but because she had been paying attention to him for twenty years and absence had a texture you learned to read.
She was going to be here when it pulled taut again.
She turned away from the window and went to make coffee.
She had work to do.
* * *
She called Derek that evening, after the dishes were done and the curtains were closed.
"Calloway came by," she said.
A pause. "The sheriff?"
"In civilian clothes. She brought photographs, field notes, soil samples. Everything she documented before the agents took the official record." Barbara turned the drive over in her hand. "She said Bron walked into the clearing with purpose. Tracked his footprints herself. He wasn't lost."
Derek was quiet for a moment.
"I know," he finally said. "I read the prints too, when I went up there. The stride length was wrong for someone disoriented. He was moving fast and deliberately."
"She said he chose to go."
Another pause. "I've been thinking about that. About what we know and what we don't know." His voice had the careful quality he used when he was working through something he hadn't fully resolved. "He'd been asking different questions for months before this. About physics, about measurement, about whether the frameworks we use to understand space are complete." A beat. "He'd sent me an article about quantum field theory two weeks before he disappeared. Just said, what do you think about this. I wrote back that it was interesting. I didn't ask why he was asking."
Barbara thought about that.
"You couldn't have known," she said.
"I know. But I keep thinking about it."
She looked at the fragment on the table. The colors shifting slowly in the lamplight.
"Look at what Calloway gave us," she said. "And then we figure out what to do next. Together. That's what we do."
"Okay." She could hear him writing something down — always writing things down, Derek, making lists, making notes, converting anxiety into action the same way he always had since he was eight years old and had started keeping a notebook. "Okay. I'll drive up tomorrow."
"I'll have coffee ready."
* * *
The knock came at eight in the morning.
Barbara was in the kitchen with her third coffee and the fragment on the table in front of her — she'd gotten into the habit of setting it out in the mornings, the way you set out the things you needed to see to remember why you were doing what you were doing. She heard the knock and looked at the fragment and then at the clock and then went to the door.
Sheriff Calloway was standing on her porch.
Barbara had met her once, briefly, when the case was still being handled locally. A tall woman, iron-gray hair, eyes that had seen enough of human behavior to have stopped being surprised by it. She was in civilian clothes — jeans, heavy coat — which meant she was not here in any official capacity, which meant one of two things.
"Come in," Barbara said.
Calloway came in and stood in the kitchen the way people stood in a space they weren't sure of, taking it in before she settled. She looked at the fragment on the table and looked at Barbara.
"I'll get to the point," she said. "I've been sitting on something for six weeks. I've been deciding whether to bring it to you and I've decided yes." She reached into her coat and took out a USB drive. Set it on the table next to the fragment. "Photographs, soil samples, field notes. Everything I documented before the federal agents took the official record. The crater, the footprints, everything. Including—" She paused. "A photograph with something in it that wasn't supposed to be there. A shape in the sky that the agents didn't know I'd captured."
Barbara looked at the drive. Looked at Calloway.
"You came by yourself," she said.
"Yes."
"They're watching my house."
"I know. I parked two streets over." A pause. "I'm not naive about what this costs me. But you came to my office six weeks ago and asked me to tell you the truth, and I told you almost nothing, and that has been sitting with me."
Barbara picked up the drive. It was small, ordinary, the kind of thing you could buy at any hardware store. Inside it was whatever a twenty-seven-year law enforcement officer had thought was worth six weeks of risk.
"Thank you," she said.
Calloway nodded once. The nod of someone who had made the decision and was no longer second-guessing it.
"Your son walked into that clearing with purpose," she said. "I tracked his footprints. He wasn't lost, he wasn't confused. He was walking toward something deliberately." She looked at Barbara steadily. "I don't know where he went. But wherever it was, he chose to go."
Barbara held the drive and thought about Bron at seventeen saying love you, Mom for the first time without being asked, like he'd decided it and done it. Like that was just who he was going to be from now on.
She nodded.
Calloway left the way she'd come, through the front door, past the gray sedan at the end of the street, and Barbara stood at her kitchen table with a USB drive in one hand and a fragment of something impossible in the other and understood that she was no longer alone in this.
That night she put the drive in her computer.
Calloway had organized it the way a cop organized evidence — labeled, dated, with notes. The photographs came first, numbered and annotated: the truck on the service road, the corridor of dead vegetation leading through the trees, the crater. Barbara had heard Derek describe it but the photographs were different. The photographs made it real in a way description hadn't.
The glassy center was the thing. She looked at it for a long time. Fused soil, dark and iridescent, catching the camera flash in ways that ordinary earth didn't. Warm, according to Calloway's notes. Still generating heat, hours after the event. Whatever had made it had left something running.
The footprints she scrolled through twice. Calloway had documented them methodically — angle, depth, stride length, the way the toe impression was deeper than the heel in the last several prints, meaning he was leaning forward, moving fast. The last clear print pointed toward the center of the glass, and then nothing.
Her son, mid-stride, walking toward something.
She looked at that photograph for a long time.
She had raised him. She knew his walk the way she knew his voice — that particular forward lean he’d had since he was a teenager, always moving toward the next thing, impatient with standing still. She could see it in the print. The toe depth, the stride length. He had been moving fast and without hesitation, and the last print was exactly the stride of a man who had already decided.
The last image in the folder was different from the others — a wide shot of the truck from the side, taken at a different angle than the others, with a note beneath it: Check window reflection. Upper right. Barbara leaned close to the screen. The truck's window reflected the tree line and a section of sky, and in the sky—
She sat back.
In the sky, in the reflection, a shape. Elongated, smooth, wrong. The kind of shape that made her eyes want to slide past it, to look at the trees instead, to find something familiar to settle on. She made herself look at it directly. It didn't help, exactly, but she looked. She held her gaze on it until she'd absorbed the fact of it — not what it meant, not what it changed, just that it was there. That someone had been there. That Bron had not walked into an empty forest.
That someone had come for him, or he had gone to meet them.
She closed the laptop and sat in the kitchen in the quiet.
The fragment on the table hummed its faint warm hum.
"Okay," she said to the room. To Bron, wherever he was. "Okay. I hear you. I'm still here."
* * *
In her pocket, the fragment was warm against her hip, the colors shifting slowly in whatever light found it.
Impossibly far above the Montana sky, farther than any distance she’d ever been asked to hold in her mind, a man named Bron Matthews closed his eyes and saw the kitchen table and the cold coffee and his mother’s face — and held on.
She intended to be.
END
Three Months Missing is a short story set in the world of THE SENTINEL OF CRATER DAEDALUS, Book One of The Sentinel Trilogy.
By Brian Bullock / Everyone Knows Podcast | Starborne Studios | brianbullockwriter.com | X @EveryoneKnws1