Chapter 76: Waiting for a Signal
It had been exactly a month.
No anonymous messages. No new threats. No explanations. Not even from Lizzie. Just silence.
They’d hoped the number would text again. That was the plan. Let it come to them. Track it. Trap it.
She remembered Miles’s words when he looked them both in the eye, her and Craig, and said, "The only way to conclusively trace a digital footprint is to catch the message live. Once it hits your phone, don’t delete, don’t screenshot, don’t forward. Just call me immediately."
He had spoken with the kind of intensity that made you sit straighter, like even your pulse had to behave. "Once we intercept it in real-time, we can extract the packet metadata, isolate the origin point, run a traceroute. If the IP’s not bouncing through too many proxies or VPN layers, we might just get lucky."
She remembered nodding. Craig had too.
But since that day, there had been nothing. And after everything that happened, after everything that was said, the quiet wasn’t comforting. It was agonizing.
It had been a month of pretending.
Merlina tried. She laughed. She studied. She showed up for Louis even when she didn’t feel present. She told herself it was better this way. Safer. Simpler.
But the ache didn’t leave.
It lingered in the quiet moments. When her phone lit up and it wasn’t his name. When she passed him on campus and he didn’t look her way. When Louis kissed her forehead and she swallowed the guilt instead of the truth.