After a strained silence, Maya said she had to go and abruptly hung up. Adam stared at his phone, the dial tone buzzing in his ear as his pulse quickened. Maya had sounded scared and avoidant. Why would she act like that unless Clara had confided something serious, or even dangerous? The call hadn’t provided answers; it had only deepened the pit in his stomach. Leo watched him quietly, arms folded. He could tell Maya’s tone didn’t sit right with Adam, but he resisted poking at the fragile tension. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” he said gently, though the crease between his brows betrayed his concern. “There could be a dozen reasons.”
Needing another avenue, Adam moved to his laptop. He pulled up Clara’s LinkedIn profile, a professional anchor he’d checked a hundred times before. His breath hitched when the page loaded blank except for a generic grey silhouette. The account had been deactivated or deleted entirely, erasing her job history, recommendations, and posts. It was a digital void. With growing dread, he opened her Instagram next. Where once there had been a vibrant feed full of travel photos, laughing selfies, and snapshots of the two of them together, now only a barren scattering of generic images remained—a stock-like cup of coffee, an anonymous sunset, a bookstore window with no reflection. Nothing personal or identifiable. Every digital footprint was being systematically scrubbed, and the chilling question was by whom.
He scrolled deeper, confirming that all their couple photos were gone. Every single one. Posts he remembered vividly—quiet evenings on the balcony, surprise birthdays, that rain-soaked trip to the coast—were simply missing. His stomach tightened as a cold dread seeped in. What was happening? Had someone hacked her profile, or was this something else? He checked their old message threads next, but they felt strangely hollow. Conversations that once felt warm and familiar now read like broken fragments, missing context with abrupt endings and references to messages that no longer existed. It was as though someone had quietly, surgically edited their shared history.
Adam’s mind leapt to darker explanations. This didn’t feel like a simple purge; it felt purposeful. Was Clara hiding something, systematically deleting pieces of her life? Was she scared of someone, or hiding from something? His pulse began to hammer against his ribs. He needed answers and a trail. The fact that Clara had not only erased these digital footprints but had also stopped answering his calls meant something serious was unfolding. The more he searched the empty spaces she left behind, the more certain he became that something was deeply, dangerously wrong.