The night before my best friend disappeared, she shoved a crumpled five-dollar bill into my hand. “I owe you—take it,” she insisted, her forced smile unsettling but easy to dismiss. I tossed the bill into my savings jar and forgot about it. By morning, she was gone.
For weeks, her absence consumed everyone—police, parents, classmates. Rumors bloomed, none of them fitting the girl I knew. I had no clues, no answers… until one afternoon when I noticed the bill again. Along its edge, in tiny rushed handwriting, she had written three words: “Find the oak.”
There was only one oak that mattered—the huge tree behind the abandoned observatory we claimed as kids. When I went there, I found a piece of bark that had been peeled back, revealing a small hollow. Inside was a folded note.
She wrote that she hadn’t run away. She’d overheard something dangerous—something involving someone she once trusted. Terrified, she went into hiding. Her final instruction sent chills through me: “Come back at sunset on the first clear day.”
The next evening, the sky was cloudless. I returned to the oak, unsure of what to expect. Then a familiar whistle sounded from behind the observatory—our childhood signal. She stepped out, thin, tired, but alive.
Beneath the oak, she told me everything: the threat she overheard, the fear that no one would believe her, the decision to vanish and leave me a message only I would notice. The five-dollar bill had been her safest way to reach me.
When I asked what she planned to do next, she admitted she didn’t know—only that she couldn’t face it alone anymore.
I took her hand and told her she wasn’t alone.
We sat under the tree as the stars rose, just like we used to, knowing that whatever danger lay ahead, we’d face it together. The note hadn’t just been a clue—it was her lifeline, and I wasn’t letting go.