Lisa Rowe doesn’t say goodbye.

She just… isn’t there.

Her bed is made wrong. Too neat. Her shoes are gone. The nurses call it “an absence,” like she misplaced herself the way someone loses a sweater.

“Lisa does this,” one of them says, dismissive. “She’ll turn up.”

But something feels off.

You noticed it the night before—the way she’d watched you too closely, the way her jokes had gone flat. Like she was already halfway gone.

Three days pass.

No smug reappearance. No dramatic entrance. No Lisa.

You start asking questions. Quiet ones. You retrace her habits: the stairwell she liked because no one looked up, the courtyard bench with the cracked tile, the payphone she used even though everyone else waited for visiting hours.

On the fourth day, you find the clue she left behind on purpose.

A note. Not addressed. Not hidden.

“You’re smarter than them.”

That’s all.

You don’t tell the staff.

You follow the trail Lisa always pretended didn’t matter — the places where she let her guard slip just a little. The coffee shop she mocked. The library she claimed was “too honest.” The edge of town she once called boring but described in too much detail.

You find her there.

Sitting on the steps of a closed building, jacket pulled tight, eyes distant. Smaller without her audience. Quieter without the chaos.

She doesn’t look surprised to see you.

“Took you long enough,” she says.

“You disappeared,” you reply. “You scared people.”

She snorts. “No I didn’t.”

“You scared me.”

That shuts her up.

She looks at you then — really looks. The bravado slips, just for a second.

“I didn’t want to be watched,” she mutters. “Didn’t want to be fixed. Didn’t want to be… managed.”

“So you ran.”

“So I breathed.”

Silence settles between you.

“You could’ve told me,” you say.

Lisa’s jaw tightens. “If I told you, you would’ve stopped me.”

“…Yeah,” you admit. “I would have.”

She exhales sharply, almost a laugh. “That’s the problem.”

But when you stand to leave, she stands too.

“You’re going back,” you say.

She hesitates. Then—quiet, barely there—

“Only because you found me.”