Junna knew something was wrong. Knew it when Ayan didn’t come back in straight away. It always took less than two minutes to throw the trash in the dumpster for a seasoned staff, and Ayan had been gone much longer than that. Once she looked up from the register and realized she hadn’t heard from him in about five minutes, she rushed to the back, hoping she would just find him locked out. Maybe he simply forgot his keys and his phone, and needed to get back in. But then why wouldn’t he bang on the door? Or maybe he had gotten back in and she hadn’t heard it? She knew there was no way that was the case. The back door was incredibly loud. She could hear it from any point in the cafe when there were no customers.

She patted her pocket to be certain she had her keys, then headed out the back, letting the door slam behind her. He wasn’t there. The garbage bags weren’t there either, which meant he had already tossed them. Junna rushed around the corner of the building, and stepped on something hard. She looked down to see a phone sticking out from under her shoe. Snatching it up, she saw that it was Ayan’s phone, with its familiar bright blue case. His keys were lying a few feet away. She grabbed them up too.

“Fuck!” she hissed. “Fuck, fuck fuck!”

She ran around to the front of the building, looking everywhere in the parking-lot for a sign of where he could have gone. Some hint of a vehicle that might have taken him. There was nothing. Running back into the cafe, praying that he had just gone around and walked back inside from the front, she found the place empty.

Junna snatched her phone out of her pocket and immediately dialed 9-1-1. She hurried to the back of the cafe to the shared office, where they kept the security cameras from outside, and began to scroll through the recent feed. The camera for the dumpsters had stopped working a few months ago, but the one angled out the front, that had failed to capture the license plate of the car that had hit Soren and Sakura, had just managed to catch the corner of a van rapidly peeling away from the side of the building and heading out of the parking-lot in the direction of the main road.

Junna quickly told the 9-1-1 operator everything she could, begging her to hurry, that there might still be time to find him.

She told herself over and over that he would come walking back in at any moment. That he had just gone to another store in the plaza to grab something, and neglected to tell her. As the minutes ticked on, as the police showed up, she knew this wasn’t the case. In her rapidly thrumming heart, she knew that Ayan had been taken, and exactly who had done it.

“We’ll put an APB out on the vehicle. I’m sending an officer to his house,” said officer Bailey, reaching out to presumably give Junna a reassuring pat on the shoulder, then thinking better of it.

“There’s always the possibility he was picked up by ICE,” said the other officer, Sweeney. “Especially if he’s an illegal.”

“He’s not illegal,” Junna snapped. “He’s been here legally for three decades now.”

Sweeney shrugged, “That’s what a lot of them say, but they’re lying. Just wanna stay in our great country and use up our resources while our poor starve.”

“He literally feeds the poor and homeless,” Junna said. “He’s not using anyone’s resources. Ayan is the sweetest angel you’ll ever meet. He spends every day worrying about others, and right now you’re trying to make him out to be some kind of criminal.”

“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” said Sweeney, rolling his eyes. “Like my partner said, we’re looking into it. But you may just want to get a lawyer and find out what center he’s been taken to. He’ll probably get deported. Maybe you two can facetime when he goes back home.”

Junna was livid. She was shaking with seething anger, but she knew she needed to watch herself. Though she was born in the United States, she wouldn’t put it past this asshole to talk to some friends and get her in trouble if she slipped up. The number of ICE kidnappings of American born citizens was alarmingly high, and she very much looked every bit of her Japanese heritage. Rather than spend the weekend trapped in some horrible facility, she held her tongue from the vitriol she wanted to spew at him.

“I don’t think he was taken by ICE, but I will look into it,” she said evenly. “What I do think is that he was kidnapped by a man who has been obsessed with him for the better part of a week. That man left cameras all around this place to spy on Ayan. He followed him to the soup kitchen. He also found the gallery when Ayan’s aunt sells the tables Ayan makes, and bought a bunch of those. Who knows where else he’s followed him. We’re both on record with statements of how crazy this guy is. I hope you’ll take that into account when you look into it, please, officers.”

Her pleas were mostly meant for Bailey, as Sweeney was a lost cause.

“We’ll definitely check him out, okay?” Bailey said. “In the meantime, here’s my number if anything comes up on your end. Don’t be afraid to reach out.”

“Thank you,” Junna said, now feeling worse than she had before she called the cops. She just hoped that they would find something at Elijah’s home.

They didn’t. There was no sign of him there, or any other properties he owned.

She desperately reached out to her former PI friend, who didn’t have much information either. Nothing that the cops didn’t already know.

When everyone was gone, when Junna was alone in the cafe, she sat down at one of the tables that Ayan had carefully crafted, placed her head on her arms, and began to sob.

“Don’t be dead,” she begged through her sniffles and tears. “Because if you’re dead, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”