Alex!
It was an all too familiar feeling, this dark depression of hopelessness. Graciela wished she could say that she had never felt anything like this, but that would be a lie. When Alex disappeared in Portugal over two years ago, when the aurors changed their mission to search and recovery, Graciela had felt like she was going to die. Being completely helpless to find Alex, and now being of no use to find her son, she did not know if she could make it past another day. Today, today was supposed to be a beautiful day, marking a beautiful event in her and Alex's life, but all their second anniversary managed to remind her of was that she had not held her son in over a week.

A week, a week. Zacharias and the other children had been missing for over a week, and there were still no clues, not one shred of evidence to help their return. Graciela prayed for what felt like a decade but even she, as devout that she was, knew that her small mutterings could only do so much. The silence of their lives made each day pass slower, and slower, and she almost wished she and Alex could find some angry words to shout at each other, just to fill in the void. But she could not muster up any emotion. Every day that passed sucked away any semblance of an emotion, and by now all Graciela could do was sit on the window seat and stare out into the backyard. Nothing needed tending to, anymore, not while her baby was not with her.

She stretched out a foot and accidentally knocked over the soft-cover copy of her latest book. Graciela's eyes drifted toward the book, and she looked away at the sound of a door opening. Her meeting with Calliope Publishing had been perfect, but that had been before the children were taken. Her new book was about a world where the dark wizards win, how could think to publish something like that, when her family was already being attacked? She couldn't, there was no way.

Her head dropped to her shoulder as she spotted her husband, and Graciela couldn't fake a smile at Alex. "I can make dinner," she said, but hoped that he would decline.