The Body #3: Rogue and Euphemia

Chapter 7 (Rogue): A Year-Long Search

Goodbye?

Just Goodbye on a motherfucking Post-It note?

What did that even mean? Goodbye for tonight? Goodbye for forever? Was this note written of her own volition? Did someone force her to write it before taking her?

Where the hell was she? Where'd she go? I ran outside to Bat's house and pounded on their front door, not caring that it was after four in the morning.

Where was she? Where was Euphemia? I thought of her being taken against her will, of the harm they could be doing to her, to our baby and pounded on the front door harder.

The door was flung open.

"Brother, you're lucky I hadn't gone to bed yet."

"Where's Dayton? I need to talk with her."

"She's in bed."

"No, I'm right here," she said from behind him, wrapped in a robe. "What do you need, Rogue?"

"Her phone. I need Effie's phone back. I want to see if there's anything on it that can be useful. Get Sniff started on it right away."

Her face fell. "I don't have it on me. In all the confusion, I don't know if I left it in the clubhouse or handed it back to you or what happened to it."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" I erupted.

"Watch it, brother," Bat said so mildly that I'd be a fool to ignore the warning he'd just given me. The quieter he was, the closer he was to violence. And where Dayton was concerned, he was known to get lethal fast.

"I need that phone. She left me a note on a Post-It. All it said was Goodbye. I have no idea if she and the baby are OK or not."

"Well, maybe the phone's still in the clubhouse," Dayton said helpfully.

"Did you try tracking it?" Bat asked.

"I did. Tracking's not working. I'll go check the clubhouse," I said. "Sorry for bothering you."

"No problem," Dayton said. "I just wish I could be more help."

I ran over to the clubhouse, the prospect on duty looking up, his hand going to his gun until he saw it was me.

"No sign of Effie?" he asked.

"None. Have you seen a cell phone around here?"

"No, Rogue. Sorry. Want help looking?"

"No. You watch the door. I'll look." For the next two hours, I searched every fucking place I could think of and her phone wasn't anywhere.

Shit. Fuck. Damn. I needed that phone.

Even more importantly, Euphemia needed that phone. My pregnant girl was out there somewhere without her phone. I hoped she was OK. I hoped she was someplace she wanted to be and not being held someplace she didn't want to be.

Goodbye

That one word sounded so final, so abrupt, but I couldn't go there just yet. I had to think she was coming back. That she'd just needed some time to think and process things. Then I straightened up, stopping cold.

What made me think she hadn't had time to think and process and plan? She'd been thinking for weeks, most likely. She'd known all along that I'd saved Gel and hadn't even checked on her. I hadn't thought about the woman I loved. I was the worst fucking man in the world for not even thinking to see if she'd been OK. I'd made assumptions that she was OK instead of checking myself.

And she'd seen everything. Me covering Gel with my body as I took her to the ground. Me checking Gel over, seeing the blood from her wound and rushing her out of the clubhouse and off to the hospital.

Without thinking about Effie. There was no prettying that shit up, no getting around it. It was ugly, all the way around. It was something that had caused her to shut down, right in front of me, and then blame her distance on the surgery, the pain, the pain pills, the fatigue, anything but the real culprit. She'd never pointed her finger at me as the cause of her real pain.

But she'd pushed me away. Effie didn't want to talk with me, didn't want to be touched by me, didn't even look at me. And I'd suggested a motherfucking therapist, thinking she had PTSD or something like it.

No, she was just suffering from the discovery that she had the world's shittiest man who told her he loved her but hadn't shown her when it counted. She'd essentially crawled into a hole and pulled it in after her for those weeks of recovery. Euphemia was a beautiful person and had the purest heart of anyone I knew, and what I'd done had to have cut her sensitive soul deeper than I could imagine.

Deep enough that all I merited was Goodbye on a Post-It note. Fuck. I was surprised she'd given me that much. It was more than I deserved, and I'd think about that hurt I caused her constantly in the months to come. But at present, I needed to find her phone so I could find my girl. After checking every possible place in the clubhouse, I ran back home, the sun just beginning to rise. Maybe she'd come home today. Maybe.

But then another thought occurred to me and I busted my ass to get to our house. Opening the closet door, everything seemed to be in order. Her clothes were still hanging there -- although not as many as usual. I went to the dresser drawers and they were mostly empty, but there were the occasional stray pieces of clothing. Then it dawned on me that she'd left behind clothes that she'd worn on special occasions for us. The silvery dress in the closet she'd worn on our one-year anniversary. The sweater in the drawer was from our trip to a pumpkin farm where I first told her I loved her. She'd been incredibly sweet to a little girl who'd gotten separated from her parents, and after we'd found the frantic couple, I'd looked at Effie and told her what was on my heart. The red shirt left in the closet she'd been wearing when I asked her to move in with me.

With the items she'd left behind, the message to me couldn't be missed. It was as clear as Goodbye. The only sliver of hope it gave me was that she left here of her own volition.

But how did she leave? I called the gate again and asked the prospect for an accounting of every vehicle that entered and exited the grounds for an hour before the dinner to present time. I wasn't taking any chances. She could have stayed hidden somewhere and left the grounds while we were out on our bikes looking for her.

I didn't know it then, but that was the beginning of a year-long search for Effie. I had to hire two private investigators to track down all the leads because I didn't have the skills and tricks to track down a missing person, and no matter what, I still had to do my job. I had to defend my brother and my president against the murder charges they were facing.