Beca Mitchell
Present day
"Bye honey."
It had been three years.
"I love you."
It had been three years since Beca Mitchell had last seen Chloe Beale.
"Oh wait! I forgot my keys!"
Three years. No clues, no evidence, no nothing.
"Do you want me to pick something up for dinner?"
She was just
"Ugh, why Mexican?"
Gone.
"Can we at least compromise and get Chinese?"
The police say missing, but missing eventually implies found.
"Okay, so Chinese it is."
She'd left for work.
"I'll see you when I get home, okay?"
And never came back.
"Love you."
Love you too. Beca had replied. She hadn't even bothered to say I. Just Love you. A response. A mindless, hollow response. The last thing she'd ever get to say to her girlfriend, and she hadn't even thought about it before she said it. She'd replay it in her head over and over, until the words sounded like gibberish. Loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou loveyouloveyouloveyouloveyou loveyouloveyouloveyou.
Beca knew she was dead. Of course she was. Though people argued otherwise, it had only taken a week for her friends and family to start talking about the redhead in past tense. She was dead. Consciously or not, everyone knew that.
She'd called the police the morning after she'd last seen her. She wasn't answering her phone, so Beca just figured it had died and that Chloe was having a drink of working late. But when she wasn't there in the morning, Beca knew something wasn't right. Chloe would've called. Even if her phone was dead, she would've found a way.
The police took the case soon after. Apparently the whole "24 hours" thing was a myth. They'd put up posters, there had been a news story. At the beginning, people cared. People cared that she was missing. People saw her as Chloe.
It had taken a month for that to change. Chloe was gone. She became "a missing persons case" instead of a person. People didn't speak about her as if she were a human. She was an object. It wasn't what happened to her that was a tragedy, she was the tragedy.
And so Chloe Noelle Beale was gone, not missing, but gone. Nobody looked anymore. Nobody cared anymore. They'd all moved on to the next story to cry over. The next story to bake cakes and donate to.
They'd never actually cared. Grey's Anatomy had probably been off the air for a while, so they needed something else to cry over.
Beca had expected it, for people to forget. She'd seen it happen many times. But what she hadn't been ready for was how much it hurt. How much it hurt for people to just give up. To stop looking.
But eventually she too realized what a lost cause it was. Chloe, her Chloe, was gone. Not officially dead, but not officially alive.
Gone. Chloe was gone.