The Unlisted

Evelyn Harrow stepped off the late train and felt the town adjust around her like a body shifting in its sleep. Rookfield had not changed in the way towns do—no new fascia, no bright storefronts—only a slow settling, roofs reclining further into their eaves, paint losing the last of its ambition. The platform clock, still ten minutes slow, coughed out a warning that she had known to ignore since childhood. She wanted to tell herself she had not come back to be surprised; she had come because surprise had become a methodology.

She let her bag settle on her shoulder and picked her way across the station terrace. The air smelled of damp wood and the metallic tang of the river that cut the town in two. A yellowed newsprint blew across her shoes and stuck to the sole for one stubborn second, then let go. Everything here was archival by temperament: old advertisements at the windows, hand-lettered notices where electric LEDs might have been, the slow, tidy erosion of public life. Evelyn’s work taught her to read what absence made of a thing. Where others saw a house, she saw a ledger page with a blank where a name ought to be. Where others remembered faces, she scanned for the blank spaces in memory that indicated someone had been removed from the roll call.

Liam had been missing for three days when she returned. His last message had been an ordinary fragment—“I think I’m onto—” and then a line that ended mid-breath as if a sheet had been torn. She had thought, initially, that he was in trouble with someone who disliked what he wrote. She had thought too that by coming she could make trouble predictable again, subject it to the same procedures she used when restoring damaged records: a method, an approach, a beginning and end.

The Harrow family home was the same crooked thing she had left, a porch that sagged like a promise deferred, windows half-muted by curtains that had learned to keep secrets. Inside, Liam’s room showed the tiny evidence of someone who left deliberately: his mug in the sink, his bicycle propped against the stairs, a stack of notebooks with the top one marked by an elastic band. Nothing screamed violence. The radio still breathed in the living room and the kettle left pale circles of mineral residue on the stove. There was an absence, though, that was not simply the lack of a person. It felt arranged.