What If

The Deafening Silence...

The young reader sat in her room.  Miraculously she'd be able to bring her grades up to a satisfactory level, thus earning her phone back.  She didn't care that her parents had snooped around her phone.  She had nothing to hide.  She wasn't a bad child, just a little secretively rebellious at times. 

She hadn't been able to use the computers at school due to her parents sending in a note to her teacher.  So she was desperate to get onto Wattpad and find out what she'd missed.  Her eyes scanned her notifications and she saw nothing from her favorite author.  She quickly clicked over to her library and noticed nothing from Avid_Rdr had been updated.  I've been gone for a month.  She seriously hasn't written in a month?  What the world?

She went to the author's profile and noticed there had been no recent activity.  Not even a vote on another book.  Her brow furrowed and she quickly went to her messages. 

"Hey Authornim!  I'm sorry I was gone for so long!  Pfft, parents.  *eyeroll*  But my grades are up and so I got my phone back!  Oh, you probably didn't know because I'm wasn't able to message you.  My parents took my phone away because my grades weren't up to par.  It was awful.  A whole month with no phone!  Can you imagine?! Anyway, I've missed your books so much!  I was hoping to come back and see you'd finished Reversed so I could do some binge reading!  Haha!  I hope you're doing well!  Fighting!"

She waited for a while to see if there would be a response from her favorite author.  She waited several hours.  Finally as she began to get ready for bed, she checked again and found no response. 

Something isn't right. 

She quickly sent some messages out to others whom she knew read Avid_Rdr's books.  All of them were excited to see her back but also had no news of their beloved author.  Each of them had become more worried as the long silence had drug on.  No one had any answers and no one knew what to do.  They didn't know her real name, at least not beyond her first name.  No one knew where she lived, what she did, who her husband was.  They had absolutely zero ways of finding out about anything.

Avid_Rdr always promised that if she decided to stop writing she would alert her readers.  She would never leave them hanging.  The young reader felt her blood run cold. 

What if...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Gigi, c'mere to Nana.  It's time to go home."  The older woman scooped up her granddaughter into her arms and stood her on a chair at the restaurant.  She put the child's arms into her jacket and then zipped up the front. 

"Nana, I'm tired."  The little girl yawned widely and her grandmother smiled. 

"It is naptime.  Let's go home." 

The two drove home and soon Gigi was snug in bed, holding tightly to her Hello Kitty they'd bought the day  before.  The little girl never asked about her mother.  It'd been a month since she'd left Gigi in the older woman's care.  They'd heard nothing from the girl's mother. 

When she'd contacted the police to file a missing person's report, they had been able to track her down somewhere around Cancun, Mexico.  She denied ever having a daughter and said she was fine and happy. 

The older woman didn't know if she'd been injured in the head or was seriously running away from her responsibilities.

She sighed and walked out to the mailbox to check and see if anything had come today.  She found a small postcard from Cancun with a quick note written on it. 

"Mom, I'm fine.  Take care of Gigi.  I'll never be the mom you are so she's better with you than me.  Stop trying to find me.  I'm fine.  I'm sure Gigi's happy so let's just leave her be, ok?  Thanks for everything. Love, Alyssa"

The woman felt tears in her eyes.  Tears of anger and sadness.  Tears of pity for a child who would grow up without her actual mother around if things continued on like this.  She stomped back into the house, trying to see her way through the tears in her eyes.  She grabbed her tablet and flopped down on the couch needing to talk to the one person who would let her vent and simply listen without offering fixes or opinions. 

"Hey, are you busy?  I need to talk for a bit." 

She sighed as she waited for a response.  The author hadn't posted a new chapter in over a month and to be honest, she was kind of worried about her.  Her recent messages had gone unanswered and that was very much out of character for the author.

No response came, but the woman poured out her soul anyway.  She just needed a listening ear, not really someone to fix the problem so that's why talking to someone who was thousands of miles away was a blessing. 

She sent her messages and then felt guilty.  Did she only talk to the author when she had trouble?  It felt like it.  She realized it wasn't true as she glanced through previous conversations.  She noticed the author seemed fine and happy the last few times they'd talked.  She knew the authors struggled with her own times of darkness and her own problems.  The older reader had tried to be the same support to the author as the author had been to her.  Somehow she felt a little strange about this absence though. 

It was unannounced. It was sudden. 

The older reader chewed on her bottom lip as she dug through the author's profile trying to find some hint of what was happening.  She looked up her Twitter account and found just as much as she'd found on Wattpad.  Nothing. 

She felt a small panic rise up in her chest.  Something was amiss.  Something wasn't right.  She should have known after nothing was posted for a month and her messages had been unanswered.  She just assumed the author was taking time off.  Unplugging, so to speak.  But a month was too long.  Too long.  She felt a panic because she quickly realized she had no way of finding out what had changed for her friend. 

How could she find her? 

Her hand flew to her mouth. 

What if...