While her parents were unraveling in front of everyone, Celeste wasn’t even near them; she was behind the oldest part of the church, near a crumbling stone wall that supported an abandoned section of the foundation, and at first, I thought she was hiding from the chaos—but when I stepped closer, I realized she wasn’t hiding at all.
She was digging.
Not casually, not absentmindedly, but with a frantic, almost desperate intensity, using a rusted garden tool to hack into the hardened soil until it bent and snapped, and when it did, she didn’t stop—she dropped to her knees and began clawing at the earth with her bare hands, tearing through ivy, dirt, and stone as if something underneath mattered more than anything else in the world.
“Celeste?” I called out, my voice tight with confusion.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t even look up. She just kept digging.
By then, sirens were already cutting through the air as police cars arrived, officers shouting orders, trying to control the growing panic, and then Mrs. Delaney, the choir director—sharp-tongued and always quick to judge—spotted Celeste and stormed toward her, her voice slicing through the chaos.
“Celeste Cooper! What are you doing?” she snapped. “Your sister is missing, and you’re playing in the dirt?”
Celeste didn’t react. She kept digging.
Her hands were bleeding now, streaks of red smearing across the stones, but she didn’t stop, and the crowd began to gather, whispers rising like poison.
“What is wrong with that girl?”
“She doesn’t even care…”
Daniel pushed through the crowd, his face wild with fear, and when he saw his daughter kneeling there, covered in mud, ignoring everything, something inside him broke.
“Celeste!” he shouted, grabbing her shoulder. “Get up! We have to find your sister!”
The moment he touched her, she let out a sound that didn’t belong to a child—a raw, primal scream—and twisted violently, biting into his arm hard enough to make him stumble back.
The crowd gasped.
“She’s lost it!” someone cried.
Two men stepped forward, ready to pull her away, and that was when I moved.
“Back off!” I barked, stepping between them and the girl.
“Marcus, move,” Daniel said, his voice shaking. “My daughter is missing.”
“Look at her hands,” I told him.
They looked.
And then they saw it.
Celeste hadn’t been digging aimlessly—she had uncovered something.