《Echoes of Oak Valley》

Wayne drove into Oak Haven on that rainy night; the windshield wipers couldn’t clear the water off the glass, and his phone lost signal five kilometers before entering town. A sign stood at the town entrance, rust-red with white letters saying 'OAKHAVEN · POP. 402,' but the '402' had been carefully scratched off with a knife, and underneath, someone had written '398' in the same blue ballpoint pen. He didn’t think much of it at the time, he just parked the car and counted the lit windows in town—exactly three hundred ninety-eight, matching the number on the sign perfectly. Who changed it, and why, he didn’t know then; but that number later stuck in his mind like a thorn because everything in Oak Haven had to do with numbers, with 'the missing one,' with 'the replaced names.' Two days before his mother Lillian disappeared, she sent him a text: 'I remembered that thing in Oak Haven, let’s talk when I get back.' She never came back. Wayne wasn’t there to tour; he was there to take his mother away from somewhere—or at least he thought that. He checked into the town’s only hotel, where a young woman with ink-stained fingertips named Yara was behind the counter. She slid him the key and just said, 'Here you are again,' as if she had seen people like him many times before. Wayne didn’t catch the weight of her words, but the audience would gradually understand: in Oak Haven, anyone