ā ļøContent warning: This post contains themes of suicide. If anything, I've warned you!
A 39-year-old widow who lost her husband four years ago.
She loves her sons, Frederick and Alfred, with all her heart and does everything she can to give them a happy life. She wants them to feel safe, and never feel unloved or left out.
No matter how tired she is at the end of the work day, she still shows up for her children: listens to their stories, makes them dinner, kisses them goodnight.
They are the reason she gets up in the morning, and the only thing that still makes her days feel full.
She often misses the old days with her husband, how good things used to be back then, and sometimes tells the boys how proud their father would be of them if he could see them now.
In Frederick she sees her late husband, and often tells him so: the same confident, responsible, a little stubborn, but caring and kind person.
Alfred is different: a softer, shy boy, always reaching for his mother.
Despite their differences, Jessica loves and cherishes them both, calling them her reason for living. Yet she often feels she is not doing enough for them, blaming herself even when there is no fault of her own.
She was always attentive to her children. But one small moment of carelessness became a fatal mistake: the one that turned her life upside down forever...
The disappearance of her sons was the great tragedy of her life.
She couldn't sit still. She couldn't sleep. She paced from room to room, restless, hollow, haunted. She kept thinking they were still there: just in the other room, playing in the yard, sitting on the sofa and watching TV, and sometimes she could almost hear their voices. She refused to believe what had happened.
Every single day she returned to that cursed pizzeria. She questioned the staff, the customers, anyone who would listen. She showed photos and asked the same questions over and over. And every time she got the same empty answers, and was told to go home.
It got to the point where she began to suspect everyone around her: every person who looked at her the wrong way. She lunged at people, shouting the same thing over and over: It's him! He took my children!
When the pizzeria management banned her from the premises, she began calling and visiting the police station, insisting that the kidnapper was there, inside that building, and accusing the management of conspiracy.
Her paranoia bled into everything, and she started accusing random people on the street. She was fired from her job, and her neighbours tried more than once to have her admitted to a psychiatric hospital, but she refused, accusing them of insanity. Instead, she locked herself inside her house and shut the world out.
She took her sons' clothes ā their little shirts, their worn-out sweaters ā sewed doll versions of them, and began to treat them as her real children.
She rarely went outside. But when she did, it was only to buy food or to wander to the local playground, watching the children play, or telling their parents what wonderful children they had.
One November morning, a neighbour of Jess sensed that something was wrong in the house and decided to check on her.
She walked in freely through the unlocked door and moved through the dead silence. What she saw in the kitchen stopped her cold. She did not know whether to scream or call for help: at the table sat two large dolls, bearing a striking resemblance to Frederick and Alfred, Jessica's children. And above the table hung the woman's lifeless body.
The police ruled it a suicide. However, some of the neighbours claimed that a few days before the body was discovered, an unknown car had visited the house. But no one remembered the plates, or the driver.
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