She always left a little behind.

Two sips of coffee in the cup.

The tag still on the dress.

A voicemail unopened, even from her mother.

She claimed it was aesthetic. “I like the suggestion of finishing,” she once told me. “It’s more interesting than closure.”

I thought it was quirky. I thought she was quirky.

God, I was stupid.

Her name was Elise.

We dated for almost a year before she ghosted me - not in the usual way. Not with silence or distance.

She disappeared.

Gone, mid-conversation.

We were driving upstate. One of those late-October, foggy-Saturday kind of road trips. Leaves burning orange outside the window. She was humming to a song I didn’t know. Then -

Gas station.

Bathroom break.

She walked in.

She didn’t walk out.

No panic at first. Twenty minutes passed. Thirty.

I texted. I called.

Eventually, I knocked on the women’s room door, felt the chill of judgment from a woman walking out, and peeked inside.

Empty.

She was gone.

No security footage. No sightings. No credit card activity. No phone. Nothing.

Only her coffee cup in the passenger seat - still warm.

Two sips left.

The cops asked questions. Friends speculated. Reddit got weird with it.

But no one found anything.

Eventually they stopped looking.

But I couldn’t.

So I dug.

Into old emails. Into her playlists. Into half-read books she left at my place. I started noticing the pattern - the last two pages never dog-eared, the milk never quite finished, the endings never quite resolved.

Always the last 2% left behind.

Like breadcrumbs.

And then, yesterday, I got the email.

No subject line.

No text.

Just a pin.

An overlook off Route 12. No buildings. No service. Just silence.

I drove three hours.

Her car was there.

Locked.

Still warm.

Two sips of coffee in the cupholder.

And on the seat, folded like a pressed linen napkin - the dress she wore the day she vanished.

Tag still on.

I don’t know what I’m walking into.

But I’m going.

Even if it kills me.

Because now I understand: the last 2% wasn’t an accident.

It was a trail.

And this time, she wants to be followed.