The problem is she left her surname.
I knew that, sort of, but I didn’t really understand what it meant until I’m staring at search results that come back with wrong faces and wrong cities. Not her.
She would have gone back to her maiden name. I know the maiden name from an old document I found when I was fifteen, folded in the back of a box in the storage room. I wrote it down in my notebook that night and looked at it a hundred times since.
I search that instead.
Still nothing clean. Fragments. A neighborhood mentioned in an old comment thread. A city two hours away that might be right. I chase each one and they go nowhere.
I search until the sky outside my window starts going grey. Then I close the laptop and go to my eight AM lecture and sit in the third row and take notes and don’t think about it.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
I think about it constantly.
Months pass. I keep searching in the in-between spaces, late nights, free periods, the twenty minutes before my roommate gets back. I build a picture piece by piece out of almost nothing. A city. A street name mentioned once in a comment. A coffee shop tagged in a photo that a mutual connection posted years ago.
And then one night, completely by accident, I’m looking at an old photo on a distant mutual’s profile, someone I don’t even know, and there she is in the background.
Half-turned away. Laughing at something outside the frame.
I stop breathing.
I enlarge it until it pixelates.
The cheekbones. The hands.
That’s her. That’s actually her.
My hands are shaking a little when I print it. I know that’s strange. I print it anyway and I look at it for a long time.
Underneath the photo in the caption is a location tag. A coffee shop name. A city.
I have her.
I write in my notebook that night: I found her. I think I actually found her.
Then below that, smaller, the thing I can’t stop thinking: What if she doesn’t want me to.
I close the notebook.
I book a bus ticket anyway.
