“I was there the night she collapsed,” he said.
“I saw the man who dragged her into the alley behind the club. He injected her with something. She wasn’t breathing right, but she wasn’t dead. He left her there, thinking nobody saw.”
Gasps echoed across the room.
Ethan felt ice spreading through his veins.
Malik continued, “I tried to help her. I shook her, talked to her, yelled her name. She could barely breathe—but she was alive. I called 911 but no one came. No one answers calls from my neighborhood. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Ethan approached him, voice trembling.
“Why… why didn’t you come forward sooner?”
Malik lowered his head.
“Because I’m homeless. Because when I talk to the police, they laugh. But when they said she was dead… I knew something was wrong. I saw her chest moving… just a little. I swear.”
More gasps filled the chapel.
Ethan felt a painful knot tighten in his stomach—guilt, doubt, fear.
Ava had been found unconscious outside a nightclub and declared dead hours later with no clear cause. The doctors had called it “acute respiratory failure.”
But something had never made sense.
Now this boy—this stranger with nothing to gain—claimed she was alive.