The police have already decided I'm delusional.
I can see it in the way they look at everything except me—the overturned furniture, the shattered lamp, the dried blood on the doorframe that should be screaming violence but apparently whispers jilted bride instead.
I sit on the edge of Ethan's hotel bed in yesterday's jeans and a wrinkled blouse, mascara smudged into bruises beneath my eyes, and watch two men with badges perform the theater of giving a shit.
Please be okay. Please be alive. Please, Ethan, please…
The prayer loops endlessly beneath every breath, every heartbeat. I love him. God help me, I actually love him—the kind of love that's quiet and steady and doesn't feel like drowning. The kind I thought I'd never deserve after everything was into.
I chose him on purpose, yes—but somewhere in the careful construction of our safe, normal life, I fell in love with him for real. Not the consuming, terrifying love that felt like addiction. But the quiet kind, the one that feels like coming home.
And now he's gone.
"Miss Ferretti, can you think of anyone who might want to harm your fiancé?"
The older officer — mid-fifties with a thick mustache — tilts his pen against the page at an angle that tells me he hasn't written a single word since the last question.
The question detonates something in my chest.
Anyone?
Images flash behind my eyes like a slideshow I can't stop. Dark eyes watching me across a restaurant. A hand on my throat that could crush or caress with equal ease. A man who once made someone disappear for looking at me too long at a charity gala.
No. It can't be. He wouldn't. I've been so careful…
"No," I say. "Ethan doesn't have enemies, he's a financial analyst. He watches football on Sundays and argues about pasta shapes. He is not a man people take."
The younger one leans against the dresser with his arms crossed, his expression arranged into a careful blankness that reads louder than a billboard. They exchange a glance they think I don't catch — the nonverbal shorthand of two men who've already written the ending.
She got left at the altar.
She just doesn't want to admit it.
I can feel the narrative forming around me like a concrete setting. The jilted bride, the trashed room staged for sympathy. The blood — probably his, probably minor, probably from punching a wall on his way out.
The heat climbs my neck, settles in my cheeks, and I hate it. I hate the flush because it looks like embarrassment, and I am not embarrassed.
I am terrified, and no one in this room can tell the difference.
"Had he seemed anxious?" the older one continues, still clicking that goddamn pen. "Any changes in behavior? Mood swings? Withdrawal?"
I think of Ethan last week, spending forty-five minutes rearranging the seating chart so his college roommate would sit next to my aunt Teresa because she gets nervous at parties with strangers.
"He was excited," I say carefully. "He alphabetized the wedding favors by table number. That is not the behavior of a man planning to vanish."
"And is there any reason he might have left voluntarily?"
The question lands in the center of my chest and detonates. I stare at the younger officer — the one who hasn't uncrossed his arms since he walked in — and gesture at the wreckage surrounding us.
"Look at this room. Look at that doorframe. Men who get cold feet pack a bag and drive to a motel. They leave a note. They send a cowardly text at three in the morning. They don't leave blood."
The younger officer shifts his weight. Still hasn't uncrossed his arms. "Miss Ferretti, we understand you're upset—"
"Upset." I taste the word, let it sit on my tongue like poison. "You think I'm upset."
The older one writes something down. A single line.
Performative, not investigative.
"We recommend giving it forty-eight hours," he says, and the reasonableness of his tone makes my fingernails dig crescents into my palms. "In cases like these, the individual often turns up on their own once the initial—"
"Initial what?" I ask, my voice dangerously quiet. "Panic? Regret? What word were you about to use, officer?"
"Miss Ferretti, we understand this is distressing…"
"You understand nothing." The words come out serrated. "There is blood on that doorframe. Ethan's phone is in pieces. The furniture is overturned. This is not a man who changed his mind. This is a man who was taken."
They exchange another look—the universal language of men who think they're dealing with a hysterical woman.
And just like that, I'm dismissed.
"Forty-eight hours," the older one repeats, tucking his notebook away. "If we don't hear from him by then, we'll escalate. But statistically, in situations like this—"
"Get out."
I watch the door close behind them and press my fist against my sternum because the fury has compressed itself into a space so small and dense it might collapse into a black hole and take me with it.
I slide off the bed and kneel on the cold tile beside the bathroom door where Ethan's phone lies in pieces. I pick up the shattered casing, turn the body over in my hands.
The screen is cracked beyond function, but I pry the back panel loose with my thumbnail and find the SIM card still seated in its tray. Intact.
A thread — thin and fragile, but a thread.
Think, Arianna. Think!
Ethan doesn't gamble. Doesn't owe money. Doesn't have secrets—or at least not the kind that gets you kidnapped. We've been together for over a year, I know him.
The way he hums Sinatra while cooking. The way he folds his socks with religious precision. The way he looks at me like I'm the best thing that ever happened to him.
He's an orphan. No family to call. No emergency contacts except me.
I'm the only person on earth who will notice if Ethan Cole stops existing.
No. The thought is instant and vicious. I won't let him disappear. I won't let him become collateral damage in a life I thought I'd escaped.
Because that's what this feels like, isn't it?
The clinical efficiency of the room's destruction. The absence of Ethan's wallet and keys but not his luggage. The phone smashed but the SIM card intact, like someone wanted to send a message but not cut off all communication.
This wasn't random.
The realization settles over me like ice water. This was targeted, professional. Someone who knew exactly where Ethan would be, exactly when he'd be alone. Someone who wanted me to know he was taken.
No. Please, no. It can't be him. He wouldn't. Not after two years.
The doubt sinks its teeth in despite every wall I build against it.
Did I miss something? Was I so desperate to believe in the ordinary life I'd constructed that I overlooked fractures in the foundation?
The thought makes my stomach revolt, because it sounds exactly like the story those officers are already telling their sergeant — the bride so blinded by her own need for normal that she missed every sign.
I refuse to be that woman. I refuse to sit in this room and wait for a system that has already filed me under "hysterical" to deliver answers it isn't looking for.
The police have their procedures. Their forty-eight-hour windows and their carefully filed reports and their gentle, patronizing suggestions to ‘go home, get some rest, let us handle this.’
I don't have forty-eight hours.
I don't have patience for bureaucratic sympathy.
I hold the SIM card between my fingers and a thought surface, unbidden, from a depth I've spent two years filling with concrete.
I will find Ethan myself at all costs.