The morning after Elara's arrival, I woke up already rehearsing questions I had no plan of asking out loud. Instead, I did something quieter. I opened my phone and started scrolling backward through a year of my life, looking for the exact seam where Elara should have entered it and hadn't. School group chats. Old class photos. The festival thread from six months ago, thirty messages deep in nonsense about fireworks and food stalls. I told myself I wasn't looking for anything specific. That was, of course, a lie I was only telling myself. I found nothing conclusive. That was almost worse than finding something wrong — an absence so clean it felt deliberate, like someone had gone through and smoothed the evidence flat. Kenji was easier to reach than the internet, so I went to him next. "Tell me about middle school again," I said, sitting down across from him at the same cafeteria table as before, tray abandoned, notebook open like this was a study session and not an interrogation. "What, the Elara thing again?" He didn't look annoyed, exactly — more amused, like I was circling back to a joke that had already run its course. "I told you, we hung out. You, me, her." "Where?" He blinked. "What do you mean, where?" "Physically. A place. Whose house, which park, which summer." "I don't know, man, does it matter?" He laughed, but it came a beat too late, like he was buying time to search for something that wasn't there. "Somewhere. Her place, probably." "Last week you said it was a summer thing. Now it's just — somewhere." "Same difference." He shrugged, and I watched his face do the thing I'd started to recognize, the small flicker of static behind otherwise steady eyes — not guilt, not deception, just a signal trying to hold a shape it couldn't quite maintain. "Why are you being so weird about this?" I didn't have an answer that wouldn't have sounded insane, so I let it go and asked instead about the festival, the one from the group chat, the one with the photo. "You were there, right?" "Obviously." He said it like the question itself was strange. "Whole gang was there." "Was Elara?" He paused for real this time, longer than before, his eyes drifting somewhere past my shoulder like he was checking a memory against itself. "...Yeah," he said finally, slower. "Yeah, I think so. Why wouldn't she be?" I didn't push further. I'd learned already that pushing didn't produce more truth, just more static. That night I called my mother, because I'd run out of people in this city whose memory I trusted, and because some small, desperate part of me needed to hear a voice untouched by whatever was happening here. "Mom. Did you and Dad ever hear about a cousin of mine? Uncle's daughter. Elara." There was a pause on the line long enough that I thought the call had dropped. "Elara," my mother repeated, testing the word like it was something she'd once known the taste of and lost. "I think... I think we heard about her. A while back." Her voice had the particular slowness of someone reading something written in fog. "Studying somewhere, wasn't she? Your uncle mentioned it. Or your aunt. I don't — Haru, why does this matter right now?" "You don't remember when they mentioned it?" "It's been a long time," she said, and I could hear her frowning, the sound frowning makes over a phone line. "Why are you asking me this like it's an exam?" I told her it was nothing, and I meant it as an apology, not a fact. When I hung up, I sat with the specific loneliness of realizing that even the people who'd known me my whole life were standing on the same uncertain ground I was — not lying, not certain, just quietly, genuinely unmoored, the way you'd feel trying to recall the exact color of a room you'd only seen once, years ago, in bad light. The last thread I had was Riku. I didn't know him well — a friend of a friend, someone who orbited the same festival group chat without ever quite becoming a real presence in my life. But he'd posted the most in that thread, and more than that, I remembered — actually remembered, with the kind of clarity that felt like solid ground — that he'd never once mentioned Elara before this week. Now he wouldn't stop. *bro i still cant believe elara's back*, he'd written in the chat that afternoon, followed by three messages in a row before anyone could respond. *i've had a crush on her since like forever lol. remember that summer. tell her i said hi.* I messaged him directly. *Hey, random question. Do you have any old photos from that festival? The one from the group chat.* *yeah hold on*, he wrote back almost instantly, the kind of eagerness that made me suspicious before I even saw what he'd send. *not gonna lie i kept a few bc elara's in them lol. dont tell her i said that* The first photo he sent was the same one already in the group chat — the wide, badly lit shot, the shape at the edge of the frame I'd zoomed into until it dissolved. The second photo was new. Closer. Better lit. And in it, unmistakably, was a girl who was not Elara at all — different height, different hair, laughing at the camera with an expression that had nothing to do with the shape I remembered from the first photo. *that's her right? in the blue*, Riku wrote, tagging a figure in the photo that looked nothing like the girl who'd walked through my aunt's front door yesterday. I stared at the screen for a long time before answering. *Yeah*, I typed, because I didn't know what else to say, because some instinct told me that disagreeing with him would only prove, again, how alone I was in what I was seeing. He sent back a heart emoji, and then, unprompted, one more message: *man i really thought i had a shot with her that summer lol. maybe this time* I put the phone down without answering. Two photos, one thread, and now two different girls both wearing Elara's name like a coat that changed size depending on who was looking at it. I had wanted evidence. What I had instead was a slightly larger, slightly stranger version of the fog I'd started in — more data, less shape, the particular vertigo of gathering proof that pointed in every direction except toward something solid. I turned off my phone and lay in the dark, and for the first time since she'd walked through that door, I let myself consider, fully and without flinching, that the person sleeping two rooms away from me might not have a single fixed face at all — that she was, perhaps, whatever face the person looking at her needed to see. I didn't sleep well after that.

Book 1, Chapter 2: Proof of Absence