Chapter 13 – Graham #3
But Elise made a beeline for it, as if she’d been expecting it.
He leaned to see what she saw. Between two boards, a narrow notch of darkness had begun to bleed light—a faint blue glow, pulsing weakly, like someone had dropped a phone and left the screen on.
Graham knelt down beside her, close enough that their shoulders nearly brushed. He told himself to focus on the glow and not on the sudden, distracting awareness of her next to him—warm and solid in the cold hush of whatever this was becoming.
“What is that?” he murmured.
He glanced at Elise.
In the dim spill of that blue glow, her face looked different: tight around the eyes, mouth held too still. Not fear in the theatrical sense. Something closer to hesitation. Like she was weighing the cost of touching whatever was down there.
That did something unpleasant to him. A sharp, protective kind of discomfort.
Graham swallowed. Against his better judgment, and with absolutely no idea what he was volunteering for, he nodded toward the gap. “Do you want me to…?”
Elise’s gaze flicked to his hand, then to his face. A beat. Then she gave the smallest nod.
Graham exhaled once and slid his fingers into the narrow space between the boards. The wood was cool, the gap tighter than it looked. He felt around carefully, trying not to imagine what else might be wedged in there besides a phone. His fingertips brushed something smooth and hard.
A rectangle. Glass.
He hooked it, testing the angle, and found it jammed in deeper than it should’ve been—wedged like it had been pushed in on purpose.
After a moment of fumbling, he managed to pinch either side and lever it free.
The phone scraped against the wood as it came out, resisting until the last second, when it slipped into his palm with a soft, unpleasant thunk, still buzzing incessantly.
Graham stared at it. How had it even gotten in there? It certainly hadn’t fallen by accident.
He turned the phone over in his hand. The screen lit the moment his thumb brushed the side—faint at first, then brighter, as if it had been waiting for contact. Elise scooted closer without thinking, and suddenly they were shoulder-to-shoulder, heads tipped toward the same small rectangle of light.
For a second, Graham registered the intimacy of it—how close she was, how their breath shared the same narrow space—before the screen stole all of his attention.
Notifications began to stack.
Five. Ten. Twenty.
They arrived in a rapid succession, the kind of digital avalanche that only happened when a phone came back to life after being off-grid—after dead battery or no signal or something intentionally quieted.
The screen kept filling, banners sliding down and bumping each other out of the way, the device vibrating faintly in his palm.
Graham and Elise just watched it together, unmoving, as the phone continued to wake up.
Jen
Ellen - where are you? We’re worried. Please check in stat!
We can’t hold curtain any longer.
Ellen?
Bex
YO WHERE ARE YOU
Mom
Honey, you haven’t answered your phone, can you let me know you’re alright?
I’m worried, your phone has been going to voicemail
Romy
we’re all worried about you. can you call? are you okay?
Message after message after message.
He looked again, sharper now. The contact photo. The familiar initials. The time stamps that stretched back for days, like the phone had been holding its breath.
This is Ellen’s phone.
How could that be?
Ellen hadn’t even made it to this city. That was the story. The understudy who’d vanished.
Graham had assumed—because it was the easiest explanation—that it had something to do with her breakup with Lark. Unfortunate. Ugly. Not unheard of in a touring company where emotions ran hot and exits were always imminent.
But this—
This felt like proof of something else entirely. Something wrong. Something that made the skin along his arms tighten, instinct rising before reason could catch up.
“It’s… Ellen’s,” Elise said, voice low, as if saying it out loud might make it more real. She stared at the screen like it might change if she willed it hard enough. “I don’t understand.”
Graham glanced at her hands.
She was rubbing the backs of them again, thumb sweeping over those tattoos in an unconscious, self-soothing loop. She looked more worried than he’d ever seen her—more exposed, like the calm she carried around had cracked.
Then her gaze snapped up, and her voice came out firm enough to cut through the buzzing in the room.
“We need to go. Now. We need to call Jen.”
Graham still felt in the dark—still missing pieces he didn’t even know existed—but something primitive in him agreed immediately. The theatre around them felt… different. Heavy. Dark in a way that had nothing to do with the lighting.
Dangerous.
“Yeah,” he said, already moving. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Elise clutched the phone like a warning bell, and they moved fast, grabbing their bags and rushing out through the fluorescent hallway and into the night.
Behind them, the lights flickered once, sharp and brief, as they slipped out the door.