The water bottle stared back at Chloe from the corner of the desk, condensation creeping down its surface like liquid whispers. She tapped her pen against her notebook—a steady, anxious rhythm. Outside, the rain flung itself against the windows, indistinct shadows skimming the soaked sidewalk below. Chloe felt like one of those shadows these days, blurred and flat, slipping through the spaces between her life.

“Still here?” Ethan’s voice dragged her back. It always did—the soft scrape of gravel in his tone. He leaned against the doorway, his too-large hoodie hanging like deflated wings around his shoulders. His eyes skimmed over the room, landing momentarily on the same water bottle.

“Yeah,” Chloe replied, though the word tasted hollow. She put the pen down and met his gaze.

Ethan traced the edge of the empty wrapper from his granola bar, slowly, deliberately. “You’re awfully quiet. Did you… think more about what we talked about?”

Chloe tightened her grip around her notebook, fingers curling over loops of indecipherable doodles. “Do we have to go back to that?” Her voice sounded brittle, like glass stretched too thin, ready to shatter.

He crossed the threshold now, stepping into her tiny office filled with papers, books—objects no longer strong enough to tether anything together. The air hung awkward between them. Ethan’s eyes held something Chloe didn’t want to name—expectation, or maybe exhaustion.

Their conversation last night hadn’t brought closure. It hadn’t brought anything but the eerie, suffocating quiet they’d both clung to like drowning sailors clutching opposite sides of an abandoned raft.

“It’s not about us," Ethan said finally, snapping the wrapper between his fingers. “It’s about her. Nicole.”

Her name snagged in the room’s buzzing silence. Chloe’s pulse tripped over itself at the weight of it. Nicole. The name was a doorway she never wanted to open again, but now it wedged itself into the conversation, uninvited.

“I think she’d want us to look,” Ethan said after moments stretched too thin to hold any more. His gaze flitted to her desk—where the water bottle sat, motionless, yet inexplicably heavy with its own presence. The words tightened something in her chest, sharp and sour. She shook her head sharply.

“It doesn’t help anyone to drag it up,” she muttered. “She’s been gone for—”

“—two months,” he interrupted. His voice trembled, just a crack beneath the usual gravel. “She doesn’t just disappear, Chloe. People don’t vanish like that.”

Except Nicole had. Without a sign. Without a trace.

Ethan stepped closer, and Chloe felt the weight of his energy suddenly—an insistent, stormy tide pressing against the fragile scaffolding she’d built in her head to keep herself together. His hand brushed the desk, absent-mindedly tipping over the water bottle. The loud clink echoed in their quiet war of emotions.

They both startled—Chloe, her eyes darting towards the fallen bottle, and Ethan, exhaling as though he’d been holding his breath too long.

The puddle darkened the papers sprawled across her desk. Chloe found herself staring at the spreading blot like it contained an answer—or a question even she couldn’t phrase.

“Do you ever think,” Ethan began again, softer now, “that maybe… she didn’t leave? Maybe she’s just waiting for us, somewhere.”

Later that night, Chloe sat alone at the edge of the pier where Nicole had last been seen. Rain clung to her cheeks and lashes, blending with tears she didn’t bother to brush away. Her hands cradled that now-empty, once-“negative” water bottle—a petty source of tension in Nicole’s own complicated, fleeting life. Why hold onto it? Chloe had wondered often.

Tonight, she finally uncapped it, tilted it over the black waters below. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. The bottle somersaulted into the churning waves.

And in the gentle light of the moon breaking through retreating clouds, the ripples across the water suddenly carried meaning—not loss, but the imprint of something reaching for hope. For tomorrow.

Somehow, Chloe was sure Nicole had always been waiting for them to understand. A light gust kissed her damp face as if to confirm—you’ve found the first clue.

Maybe, just maybe, the story wasn’t over yet.