Hide and Secret (Wattys2015)

(13) Serena's POV

About twenty minutes later, Taylor and I were standing at Theo's front door. Both of us stared at the door, neither of us willing to raise a fist on it to knock. I gave Taylor a look that clearly said, Go. She gave me a similar look back, and just from that I knew that there was no way I'd get her to knock on the door for me.

Just as I was about to knock for myself, the door flew open and Theo himself stood there. He looked surprised to see Taylor and me standing on his front stoop. "Um... Hey, guys." He did a decent job at masking his surprise. "What's up?"

"Uh, you see..." Taylor began, and I spoke the same time she did.

"Well..."

"It's kind of..."

"It's about..."

After a few seconds of us flustered and trying to talk over each other, Taylor kept quiet and decided to let me tell Theo what was going on. "What did you say to Jill? Like, exactly? 'Cause she's missing, and we were wondering if something you said might have caused her to run away."

Theo looked pained, and his face paled to a dangerous shade of grey. "I broke up with her, Serena. I told her everything, and I did it for us. Now we can be together."

My eyes widened in shock as my heart started to beat rapidly. "Everything?" I squeaked.

As Theo nodded, Taylor asked the thing we were all thinking. "Do you think that dumping Jill pushed her over the edge? Maybe she..."

"Don't say what you're thinking. It'll make me feel more guilty," I interrupted. I wasn't sure how I felt about this. I wasn't sure how I felt about Theo. Hell, after Jill's disappearance and the realization that someone truly was stalking us, I wasn't sure how I felt about anything anymore. But now wasn't the time for a pity party. We had to get serious and figure out where Jill was, whether she was dead or alive. "Theo, do you know if Jill ran off after you dropped the bomb?"

Theo stared at me. "She ran in the direction of the soccer field that's nearby her house. But Serena, I really think we need to stop and talk about us..."

"We'll talk about that later," I interrupted. I could not deal with Theo and me and us right now. My only focus was finding Jill, and making sure she was all right and unharmed. I had a good feeling that the sender might have had something to do with her disappearance. "Right now, Taylor and I need to go find Jill."

"I could come."

"I don't think she wants to see you," I informed him. Theo looked a bit upset, but didn't object as he closed the front door, leaving Taylor and me standing on the stairs. "Come on, let's go," Taylor said quickly, clearly uncomfortable simply hovering at someone's house.

We went to the soccer field, which was muddy due to the rain that had fallen a couple hours before. "If there was evidence of anything happening here, wouldn't the rain have washed it away already?" Taylor questioned.

She brought up a valid point, but all we could do was hope for the best. We scoured the area, trying to make quick work of a big job. I looked at one end of the field, and Taylor looked at the other. The heels of my black stilettos, which I had worn to school against my better judgement, kept getting stuck in the mud.

As I tried to pry my heel out of the mud yet again, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Taylor had tripped and fallen on the ground. Slipping my foot out of my heel, which was still wedged in the mud, I hopped on one foot over to Taylor to help her up. As I did, I noticed something on the ground, the thing that she tripped on. I picked it up. It was small, silver, and compact.

It was a phone. Jill's phone. I held it up to Taylor wordlessly, and her eyes widened like saucers. Then, she pointed at the ground, and I noticed some dried blood on the grass. It wasn't a lot, thank God. But it was a very good chance that it was Jill's blood. I gave Taylor a glance of concern. "Should we look in her phone?" I asked.