Present Day:

The hallway was dim. The walls were white, but covered in decor. It resembled wires and chains. The floor was dirty, infected with enough mold to frighten even the most brave. They tried to make this secret location look abandoned, and it worked.

I had passed this building often both before and after the incident. On my way to school, to work, to his grave. I never noticed it, though. It was a random, old place in the town where I grew up. The place I used to call home, but left a year ago.

After the incident I could not bear the thought of being in Mission Creek. Seeing where he lived and where we were happy was too much for me to handle. I wanted to leave. After a year being stuck there, my friends invited me to go somewhere with them, and I accepted. So I lived on an island for a whole year.

That's not to say I didn't come back. In fact, I came more than once per week. But I wouldn't tell my host family of this, of course. They would never let me leave if they thought I was constantly crying over him. But two years had passed, and the mention of his name still made me weep with sorrow.

Continuing down the hallway, I found myself becoming increasingly more scared. It had been time to turn back twenty minutes prior at the very least, but something inside me told myself to keep going. I was traveling in a group, and I knew we were summoned here for a reason.

The hallway was longer than I expected. It felt that the end would never come. But when it did, my world was turned upside down. Everything I had come to know these past few years, the things I had come to accept and forget about, it was all tarnished. Shattered. Torn to smithereens before my very eyes. And it was all because of the simplest of words:

To Be Continued