-They got to know.

They called my name through the door before they knocked. It was careful at first, as if they still believed a child might answer simply because she’d been playing too long. “Amira?” Layla’s mother’s voice wavered, soft and small, the way it sounded when she asked if I’d had enough sleep. “Are you here, sweetie?”

I pressed my back harder to the cool tiles, as if the bathroom could swallow me whole. The bathtub’s porcelain bit into my knees. My palms left wet, shaking marks on my jeans. I had to be invisible. I had to be nothing.

Footsteps padded in the hallway. My father’s voice muffled arguments I didn’t understand, and then Layla’s father’s deep tone, steadier than mine felt. “We’ve been looking everywhere for her,” he said. “Please—if anyone knows anything—”

I should have moved. I should have stood up, walked out, and said I didn’t know, or I was sorry. Instead my fingers found the edge of a plastic cup on the shelf and curled around it like a talisman. The cup was balanced badly, its rim over the tiles. My fingers trembled. I tried to breathe quietly and not think.

A laugh — too loud, a forced chuckle from my mother — drifted through the thin door. “Children wander off sometimes,” she said, falsely bright. “They find each other back at the park.”

Then silence stretched. The kind of silence that waits for someone to crack.

My hand slipped.

The cup tipped. It clinked against the enamel and fell, skittering across the tile with a sound that felt enormous in my ears.

The hallway went still. Then a muted curse, and boots rushed closer. The bathroom door swung open before I could move.

They were all there: my parents, neighbors, faces blurred with exhaustion and fear — and Layla’s mother, eyes raw and rimmed in red, standing a little apart, clinging to something that used to be whole. Layla’s father’s jaw was tight, his hands in fists. He looked at me as if trying to fit the pieces of a puzzle that wouldn’t line up.

“Why are you hiding?” he asked when his voice finally came, quiet at first, as if testing the water. “Are you—are you okay?”

I mouthed words that wouldn’t form. My voice lodged behind my teeth. My body remembered the street; it remembered the grip. My chest felt too full to breathe.

Layla’s mother stepped forward, her tone gentle. “Honey, we’re not here to hurt you. We just want to know where Layla is.” She reached for my hand like a lifeline. For a breath, her touch felt like warmth. I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to collapse in her arms and beg forgiveness. But the silence that had become practiced in me held firm.

The questions started kindly, deliberate — “When did you last see her?” “Who else was there?” They circled, soft-footed, like predators with velvet paws. Each answer they didn’t get edged their voices sharper. Politeness thinned like paper under rain.

Then Layla’s father’s tone changed. The careful man who had asked “are you okay” turned harder, sharper around the edges. “You were with her,” he said, not a question anymore. “You were there when she vanished. Why didn’t you stop it? Why didn’t you call for help?”

Words like knives. I felt them slice through the quiet I had wrapped myself in. My mouth opened; this time something came out — a cracked sound that might have been an apology, might have been nothing at all.

They leaned in, the room shrinking under their weight. Their questions piled one on top of another, polite sentences fractured into urgent demands. “Did you see the man?” “Did you run?” “Who else knew you were there?”

I could see the small town outside reflected in Layla’s mother’s tears: posters, whispered gossip, footprints that led away. I could feel their blame settling into the room like dust.

And underneath it all, coiled in my chest, was the terrible, simple thing I could not say: I ran. I left her.

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