The night Laura disappeared, the garden was lit like a dream. Christmas lights looped across the trellis,

their twinkle casting warm shadows on spilled punch and laughing faces. It was her wedding night, and she was spinning barefoot across the lawn, kicking up dust with every joyful twirl.

She was radiant.

I found her by the lemonade stand, sticky cups in our hands and sun-warmed sugar on our lips. Her face glowed as if the stars

had kissed her cheeks. She looked happy—weightless, even. Like someone who had finally stepped into the life she’d always imagined.

Her smile was quick—too quick.

There was a flicker in her eyes then. Something I should’ve noticed. A hesitation. A breath she didn’t quite finish.

By morning, she was gone.

She hadn’t slept in the hotel room where she’d dressed the night before. Her wedding gown was folded neatly at the foot of the bed, untouched. Her phone hadn’t moved. No texts, no note. Just… absence.

She didn’t say goodbye.

The police came. They asked Luke all the questions. Dragged the pond. Questioned neighbors and delivery drivers. They examined camera footage, called hospitals. But Laura vanished like wind through dry cornstalks—one second here, the next not.

We never found a single trace.

And the silence that followed—well, it swallowed everything.

Mama’s voice lost its music. Daddy’s steady walk turned slow. And whatever invisible thread used to bind our family, keep us in rhythm, in laughter, in ordinary joy—it frayed with her name and finally disappeared.

I moved into Laura’s room eventually. Not because I wanted to take her place, but because it felt wrong to leave it frozen. I packed her things gently. Folded her books into boxes. Stacked her sketches and ribbons and high school trophies.

But I never opened those boxes. Never had the heart.

Ten long years went by like a slow-moving fog. The kind that clings to the ground even after the sun rises. We lived, somehow. Luke remarried. Mama aged. Daddy passed. And I tried to forget the way she danced barefoot that night.

Then one rainy morning, I was digging through the attic, looking for an old picture to bring to a family reunion. I lifted a dusty tin box and out slid a pale envelope. My name was on it. Scrawled in Laura’s handwriting.