The night Hannah Osborn disappeared, the Mesquite Rodeo smelled like burnt sugar and cheap beer and the kind of freedom only sixteen-year-olds can taste. She was everywhere at once, pink cowboy boots flashing under the neon, ponytail whipping as she spun in circles to Morgan Wallen, laughing so hard her braces caught the strobe lights like tiny mirrors. Her friends filmed her on Snapchat, captioned it Texas forever baby, and for three perfect hours she was untouchable, a comet streaking across a sky that still believed in happy endings.

Then the song ended. The lights dimmed. And Hannah walked out of the frame forever.

She stepped into the south parking lot at 11:43 p.m., phone pressed to her ear, telling someone she loved them. The security camera caught the exact moment the darkness swallowed her, one pink boot still visible for half a heartbeat before the floodlight’s edge cut her in two. After that, nothing. No scream carried on the wind. No tires squealed. Just the hollow space where a girl used to be.

Her father felt it before the phone call came. James Osborn was elbow-deep in a busted transmission when the wrench slipped and sliced his knuckle clean to the bone. He stared at the blood blooming across the concrete like it was trying to spell something he couldn’t yet read. By the time the cop cars rolled up to his shop with lights flashing silent and slow, he already knew. He dropped the wrench, walked out without a word, and drove straight to the rodeo grounds still wearing his greasy coveralls. When they told him she was gone, he didn’t cry. He just looked up at the sky and said, so quiet only the nearest deputy heard, “Bring my girl home.”

That was six nights ago.

Since then James hasn’t slept. He sits in Hannah’s bedroom until the sun comes up, breathing in the ghost of strawberry shampoo that still clings to her pillow. He touches the trophies on her shelf, the ones she won barrel racing on a mare named Whiskey, and traces the dust that has started to settle like early snow. He opens her diary and reads the last entry again and again, the one dated November 1 where she wrote in purple gel pen: Jaxon says we could run away for real. I’m scared but I’m more scared of staying. He closes the book before he reaches the part about Derek walking in on her in the shower, because some truths are still too sharp to hold.

At 2:17 a.m. on the sixth night he types the words with bloody thumbs: BRING MY GIRL HOME. Everyone will know soon. I promise you that. He stares at the screen until the letters blur, then deletes the post. Too late. The internet never forgets. By dawn the phrase is spray-painted across the water tower, stitched onto pink T-shirts, carved into the bleachers where Hannah once cheered for the Mesquite Skeeters. Mothers whisper it like a prayer. Fathers growl it like a threat.

James knows things the police don’t. He knows about the way Derek’s eyes lingered too long when Hannah bent over to tie her boots. He knows Jaxon’s uncle runs girls across the border in horse trailers with false floors. He knows his own hands are stained with more than transmission fluid, that the life insurance policy he took out on Hannah three weeks ago has a payout big enough to disappear forever. He knows the pink cowboy boot they pulled from Lake Ray Hubbard had scratch marks inside, tiny desperate fingernails clawing for daylight that never came.

He knows, and the weight of it is crushing him from the inside out.

So at 11:47 p.m. on the seventh night he climbs into his pickup with the engine running and the headlights off, parks outside the Mesquite Police Department, and films himself one last time. The dashboard clock glows red like a fresh wound. Rain streaks the windshield in silver rivers. His voice is barely above a whisper, but it carries the force of a man who has nothing left to lose.

“I’m about to go in there and tell them everything,” he says. “No more protecting people who don’t deserve it. Hannah, baby, if you can hear Daddy, hold on. The truth is coming.”

He kills the video. Steps out into the storm. The doors of the station swallow him whole.

Behind him, two hundred people stand in the pouring rain holding candles that refuse to die. They’re singing her song, the one she played on repeat the week before she vanished, voices rising together until the words crack open the night.

Bring my girl home. Bring my girl home. Bring my girl home.

Somewhere in the darkness, a father is finally telling the truth.

And whatever that truth is, it’s going to burn Mesquite to the ground.