Dear Luke,

This will be the last thing I ever send you. I don’t even know if you’ll remember who I am by the time you read this. For your sake I hope you don’t. For my sake, and for everything I’ve lost, I had to write you this story. One you’re a part of, and one that never happened. I have to tell you the story of how I disappeared.

I’ve got no idea when this whole thing actually started. There’s simply no way to tell how much of my life slipped away under my nose before I could ever even know. There’s no telling what all it’s taken from me. There’s no telling how long it’s been eating.

Four nights ago. That’s the first time I noticed something missing. Less than a week, and a lifetime of difference. I had a lot back then, a lot to be thankful for. I’d just landed a new IT job, my first actual job out of college. Me and Nora were able to finally move out of the ratty one bedroom place we had to a real house in Cypress. Our son got his own room just after his first birthday. You and I had to wait fifteen years for that. Nora was able to quit her retail job and stay home with him, which is what she’d always wanted to do. Lord knows she deserved to be able to after all she’d done to help me finish my degree. You helped us move in that weekend – you, Janet and the girls. I remember we sat down under the patio in the back yard talking about all of y’all coming over in the fall to grill and watch football. Things looked so hopeful. But that was a different world than the one we’re living in now.

It was late Tuesday night, a little past nine. Nora had just retreated into our room, starting her nightly fight to rock the baby to sleep. While she was doing that, I was going to head back to the old apartment and grab the last few loads of belongings that needed to be moved. By Tuesday night, most of the boxes were residing in our living room and I’d made almost five trips Monday after work, but there still remained about two car loads left. I remember looking at it all Saturday after you and I had worked all day to move the big stuff, knowing all that was left, and asking myself how so much could fit in our little hole in the wall.

I snuck out as quietly as I could to my car in the garage, being careful not to make a sound and wake the baby. He’s a really light sleeper, and I didn’t want to make the already difficult task of getting him to sleep any more of a burden on Nora. I was able to get out of the house without much of a sound, and started my car. It wasn’t until I was halfway down the street when I realized I had forgotten the keys to our old place.

I turned the car around, grateful to have only gone that far. The drive between our apartment and house was a solid twenty minutes, and I’d already made the mistake of going all that way without a key once that weekend.

I opened the garage door into the kitchen with just as much caution as I had left with. The house was completely dark, save my car’s low beams shining through the open door into the kitchen. It was just enough to see where the key should have been – a little key ring holder right next to the pantry. I say should, because it wasn’t there. It was missing.

An annoyed sigh left my mouth. I’d left them on that key ring the night before just in case Nora needed to run and grab something urgent. God only knew where they’d traveled to in those 24 hours. The whole reason we only had one key between us in the first place was because of our son’s excessive need to play with them. Even after we decided maybe the house keys weren’t the best toy for an 11 month old to be playing with and got him some play baby keys, he’d only ever be satisfied by the jingle jangle of the real thing.

I looked out at the sea of boxes crowding the living room, hoping I wouldn’t have to go searching through them. Flipping on my phone flashlight, I started carefully opening drawers in the kitchen, hoping maybe Nora had used them and just put them back in an odd spot. Her soft lullaby was still filling the silence of our house. It’d still be a good while before I could ask her.

I moved at a snail’s pace trying every drawer, trying to be as quiet as possible. I probably could have gone quicker, made a little more noise since we had a much larger buffer of space in the new house, but having lived in such a small apartment for so long and having woken the baby by even the slightest of movements had trained me to be overly hesitant. Every creak felt like a shout, no matter how careful I was.

My search of the drawers proved barren. I started on the living room, trying my best to dodge around our scattered boxed belongings and scan the floor with my flashlight, keeping my eye peeled for a glint of anything shiny. Still nothing. I decided it was probably going to be easiest to just wait until the baby was down and I could ask Nora if she’d seen them. If not, I could at least flip the lights back on and actually see where I was looking. I turned back around to snake back through the living room to turn off my still running car, when I felt my foot catch against a stack of the boxes and send me stumbling over. What followed was a crash that probably could have been heard three houses away.