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## Eight Years After Her Daughter’s Disappearance
She no longer set an alarm. Her body remembered the hour instinctively, as if some internal clock had been permanently rewired the night everything changed. Back then, she used the early mornings to prepare lunches, braid hair, argue gently about jackets. Now, she sat at the kitchen table with a mug of tea she often forgot to drink, watching the light creep across the floor.
Grief, she had learned, does not fade. It changes shape.
### The Day Time Stopped Moving Forward
People often asked if she remembered *the day*. As if it were a single moment, neatly framed. As if memory worked like that.
She remembered fragments instead.
A half-packed backpack by the door.
A text message that didn’t sound alarming enough at first.
The strange quiet that fell over the house when evening came and her daughter still wasn’t home.
At the time, everyone told her not to panic. Teenagers ran late. Phones died. Friends lost track of time. Mara wanted desperately to believe them.
By midnight, belief was no longer an option.
### Living in the In-Between
Eight years later, Mara existed in a strange emotional borderland. Her daughter was not declared dead. There was no body, no proof, no finality. Just absence.
People think uncertainty is easier than loss. It isn’t.
Uncertainty is its own kind of prison. It leaves no room for grief to settle, no place to lay flowers and say goodbye. Instead, it demands constant vigilance. A readiness for news. A mind that refuses to close doors.
Mara lived in this in-between space, where hope and despair took turns occupying the same breath.
Some days, she imagined her daughter alive somewhere—older now, changed, perhaps unaware of how fiercely she was still loved. Other days, the weight of reality pressed so heavily on her chest that she could barely breathe.
Both possibilities hurt. Both felt unbearable.
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