Mavis awoke with a jolt, her heart thundering as if it were a drumbeat signaling an alarm. For a moment, she lay there in the thin morning light, wrestling with the remnants of her dreams. Images of Axel flickered through her mind—the lopsided grin, the gleam in his eye as he talked about places she could only imagine. She reached across the bed, her fingers brushing the empty sheets. Cold.
"Axel?" she called out, her voice barely above a whisper. She sat up, listening, waiting. Silence.
Mavis slipped out of bed and moved through the house, checking the small corners, the porch, even the garden outside where they'd spent so many hours talking. But it was as if he'd simply vanished. The ache of it was sudden and sharp, twisting in her chest. Axel was gone—just like that, like mist dissolving into the morning sun.
When her grandmother appeared in the kitchen doorway, already dressed for the day, Mavis forced herself to smile, to push away the questions that lingered in her eyes. She didn't know why, but she couldn't bring herself to tell the truth.
"He left early," she said, barely able to keep her voice steady. "Said he had to go back to his place."
Her grandmother raised a brow but didn't question her further, simply nodding as if she'd expected as much. But her expression softened, and she patted Mavis's shoulder. "Well, that's the way of travelers, isn't it? They come and go as the wind takes them."
The day went on, but the absence hung over her like a shadow. Mavis found herself going back to that last conversation they'd had, Axel's face illuminated in the faint glow of the fire. He'd been talking about places she didn't believe existed, dimensions that layered over their world, each more incredible than the last. At the time, she'd laughed it off, chalking it up to his boundless imagination. But now, she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something more, something hidden in his words that she hadn't seen before.
A strange determination welled up inside her, a fire that grew with every passing moment. She needed to know where he'd gone, how he'd vanished so completely. She needed to understand the worlds Axel had talked about.
For the next few days, she began to search. She wandered the places he'd shown her in their short time together, looking for signs, traces, anything that might explain his sudden departure. She scoured the library for books on anything remotely close to the topics he'd hinted at. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, she began to feel herself drawn to something beyond the ordinary, something that might have led Axel away from her.
Mavis could feel it in the air, a faint humming at the edge of her awareness, something vast and unknown, waiting just beyond reach.
YOU ARE READING
"The Me She Never Had"
Random"The Me She Never Had" tells the haunting and mysterious tale of Mavis, a girl who was born dead in one world, but alive in another. Unknown to her mother, Yvonne, Mavis has been living in a parallel reality-a realm where she exists as a vibrant you...
