Their daughter disappeared after the graduation party, and 20 years later the father finally opened the old school album – and on one of the photos he saw something terrifying 

The daughter vanished on the night of the graduation ball. After the ceremony she went with her friends to a party. Her parents expected her back in the morning, but she never came home. At first they thought she had stayed at a friend’s house, then that she had simply gotten lost. But at dawn, her abandoned bag was found near a bus stop. No witnesses, no traces. Only silence and endless searches that led nowhere.

Twenty years later, for the first time in a long while, the parents decided to go through the belongings left behind by their daughter. The room looked as if time had stopped: the school uniform still hung neatly on the hook, on the shelf sat her diary covered with stickers, and yellowed posters decorated the walls.

The father slowly sifted through boxes of textbooks, notebooks, and magazines, when at the bottom of a drawer his fingers touched a heavy cover. It was the old school photo album. He had never opened it before – the pain of memories had been too great.

Dust rose into the air as he carefully placed the album on the table. After a long hesitation, he finally opened the first page. On the glossy sheets smiled children: classmates, teachers, festive scenes of graduation.

Everything seemed so vivid, as if they were about to come alive and start speaking.

On one of the pages his gaze froze. There was a photo of his daughter in her school uniform, wearing the “Graduate” sash. Her eyes shone with hope, her lips carried that smile he would never see again.

But right on that photograph the father noticed something horrifying – and suddenly he understood where his daughter had disappeared  To be continued in the first comment 

Behind his daughter, as if he had accidentally slipped into the frame, stood a man. A man he had never seen before. A stranger. His face was in shadow, but the cold eyes were clearly visible. They weren’t looking at the camera – they were staring directly at her.

He seemed oblivious to the photographer, as if his only purpose was that intense gaze fixed on the girl in the center of the picture.

The father’s hands began to tremble. He remembered how that night his daughter had vanished without a trace. No one could ever explain what had happened. And now, twenty years later, this photograph seemed to say: the answer had always been there – on the picture no one had noticed.

In that moment, the puzzle that had been buried in his memory for years began to come together. The one responsible for his daughter’s disappearance was the man whose gaze was locked on her.