He pressed his palm to the windowpane. “I see you too,” he whispered.
Leo dropped to his knees on the wet asphalt. “Mia. Baby. Where are you?”
Leo sat on the edge of Mia’s bed and wept. But when he finished, he felt something he hadn’t felt in months: a future. He walked to the window. The snow was covering the street, white and new. Somewhere, in the cracks between 2019 and everything that would come after, a little girl was laughing. And a lonely year was watching him through the glass of time, hoping he would be okay. i see you -2019-
“I don’t need proof,” Leo said. “I just need to know it’s true.”
“Teach me to see her,” he said. “Not through a crack. Through the wall. Show me how to live in 2020, 2021, all the years after, and still know she’s in the long now. Still know she sees me.” He pressed his palm to the windowpane
On the third week, the rules changed. A postcard of a payphone at a rest stop he knew—the one off I-84, twenty miles from where Mia disappeared. On the back, a time: 11:14 p.m. And those same haunting hyphens.
“I’m in the long now,” she said. Her voice was small but not scared. “The lady says you can’t come here yet. But she says I can see you. Through the cracks.” “Mia
He showed it to Detective Rivas, who sighed and said, “Could be a copycat. Could be a sick joke.” But Leo noticed how Rivas’s eyes lingered on the dash before the year. Those hyphens. Like a frame. Like someone had carved a moment out of time.
“Daddy?”