4.57: Never Coming Home

My little girl is gone.

There was no note. No goodbye.

She just packed up some clothes and left.

Gus was the first one to figure out what happened. He went to her room to let her know breakfast was ready, but she didn’t answer her door. So he went inside… And she was gone.

We looked all over the house, but of course, there was no sign of her.

And poor Lettie must have called her about two dozen times, but she never picked up. Then we called Clara, Lucas, even Mark… And none of them knew where she was either. We were literally seconds away from making another call – to the police this time – when my phone started ringing.

I almost did a double-take when I saw Stefan’s name pop up on the caller ID. We’ve had a lot of practice with this whole ‘time zones’ thing over the years – I knew it was barely even 4am over in Willow Creek. Why would he be calling? What could have happened?

Somehow, the thought never even crossed my mind that it could be about Jocelyne.

I almost couldn’t believe it when he told us – none of us could. But afterwards, we checked our bank statements and there it was – the credit card we’d given Jocelyne for emergencies had a charge on it for over a thousand euros at the Windenburg airport.

She refused to talk to any of us, of course. But Stefan promised she was fine and that he and his wife would take care of her until we figure this out.

If we figure it out.

I called Josh a little while ago. I wasn’t really sure who else I could turn to. And even though he’d been pretty critical of how we handled things with Mark and Jocelyne, he agreed that she needed to come home. “Don’t worry.” He told me. “I’ll talk to her.”

But will that be enough?

God, I don’t know what to do. Part of me wants to hop on a plane myself and go over there… But what good would that do? How would it do anything but make her hate us even more?

All I can do right now is thank God for Josh and Stefan and keep hoping they can talk some sense into her.

Because if they can’t, well…

Something tells me my little girl is never coming home.

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Note: This chapter ends the overall Gen 4 YA arc 😮 I almost can’t believe it! Starting tomorrow, we enter a section of the story I like to call “Gen 4.5” (but I’m still including it as part of Gen 4 😛 )

Tomorrow will be our last daily update, then I will return to my usual schedule of having no new chapters Mondays or Fridays. 🙂

Thank you so much to everyone for reading, as always!