She came back!

I don’t remember leaving the bathroom. I don’t remember my father’s hand on my shoulder, or the way my mother whispered for me to calm down. What I remember are their faces.

Layla’s mother, with her swollen eyes and trembling hands, trying to hold her grief together in front of me. Layla’s father, his mouth a thin, hard line, looking at me as though I wasn’t a child at all, but a wall standing between him and the truth.

They didn’t shout. Not then. But their voices dug deeper than screams ever could.

“She was with you,” he repeated. “You must have seen something. Anything.”

And I shook my head until it ached, because the truth was unbearable: I had seen everything, and I had done nothing.

Their questions came like waves. First soft, coaxing, gentle enough for a frightened ten-year-old. Then sharper, faster, turning into something like an interrogation. I remember my mother stepping between us, her voice cracking as she tried to defend me. “She’s just a child,” she said. “She doesn’t understand.”

But I did. I understood enough to know I was guilty.

I understood it in the way Layla’s mother’s shoulders slumped as though a piece of her had been stolen forever. I understood it in the way her father’s jaw clenched when he looked at me. He didn’t have to say the words aloud. You left her. You chose yourself over my daughter.

That was the day I learned how to carry blame in silence.

The town moved quickly after that — posters, meetings, search parties. Everyone wanted answers, but the only one who could give them was me, and I stayed silent. I told myself it was fear. I told myself no one would believe me. But beneath those excuses lay the truth: I was a coward.

Children in the neighborhood began to look at me differently. Some with pity, others with suspicion. Even when their parents whispered behind closed doors, I heard it in the way they said my name. That’s the girl who was there. That’s the girl who ran.

And sometimes, late at night, when my parents thought I was asleep, I would hear the grief of Layla’s family spilling out of them like smoke through thin walls.

“She should have come home with Amira.”

“They were inseparable.”

“She knows more than she’s saying.”

Each word pressed down on me until I thought I might split apart.

And then one night, lying awake in the dark, I heard her.

Amira.

Her voice was soft, almost kind. A voice I had missed for months. My heart raced, my skin prickled, but for one dizzy second, relief washed over me.

Why didn’t you help me?

I froze.

Her voice again, fainter, echoing inside my chest. Why did you run?

I clutched my pillow, whispering into the dark, “I’m sorry, Layla. I’m so sorry.”

But apologies didn’t quiet her. That was the night she returned to me — not in body, not in the way I had prayed for — but as a shadow in my mind.