''Silent Honeymoon''

by [khan]

The ocean whispered secrets to the shore, but no one was there to listen. Not anymore.

Three days had passed since anyone last saw Olivia and Marcus Dale — newlyweds who checked into the Cliffside Resort for their honeymoon and vanished before sunrise.

The staff remembered their arrival clearly. Olivia, radiant in a linen sundress, had laughed at something Marcus whispered. They held hands tightly, as if afraid the world might pry them apart. Room 207, ocean view. No room service. No disturbances. A “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on their door for two days.

Then silence.

Housekeeping knocked. No answer. After the third attempt, the manager unlocked the door.

Inside: untouched sheets, two half-drunk glasses of champagne on the balcony, a suitcase half-unpacked.

No sign of the couple.

Detective Lena Moore had seen disappearances before, but something about this one gnawed at her. The room wasn't staged like the others she’d worked — no signs of struggle, no mess, no blood. Just... absence. Like they had evaporated.

She stared at the folded brochure left on the nightstand. "The Silent Shores: Find Peace Where the World Disappears." A cheesy resort slogan, but suddenly unsettling.

“I need the guest log,” she told the front desk clerk. “And security footage.”

The footage showed Marcus and Olivia walking along the beach just after midnight on their second night. No other guests nearby. They strolled barefoot, stopping near the rocks where the waves hit hardest.

They never came back.

Locals whispered about the cliffside — how the tide changed shape there, how voices sometimes echoed without a source. Lena didn’t believe in ghost stories, but she believed in people doing desperate things.

Suicide? Maybe. But they looked happy. She rewatched the video: Olivia paused, turned to Marcus, and kissed him hard — like someone who wanted more time, not less.

Why vanish?

Lena visited the rocky stretch herself. The sea was louder here, almost roaring. Seagulls circled above like restless witnesses. She climbed down to the tidepools, where she found something glinting between the rocks.

A gold bracelet. Olivia’s initials.

She bagged it and looked around. No footprints remained. The tide had wiped them clean.

Back at the station, she dug into the couple’s past. No red flags. Marcus was a photographer; Olivia, a librarian. Quiet lives. Clean records. But one thing stood out: six months ago, Olivia’s younger sister had drowned off a private beach. Case closed as an accident.

But Olivia had contested the ruling. Filed complaints. Accused the resort’s parent company of negligence.

And now she was gone — from a resort owned by the same corporation.

The dots connected like a bruise forming.

What if the honeymoon wasn’t just a celebration? What if it was a plan?

Lena called the Coast Guard, demanded a wider search. Nothing.

Then, late one evening, she received an anonymous package.

Inside: a USB drive. A video file.

She clicked play.

The screen flickered, showing Olivia and Marcus in a small wooden boat, miles offshore. Olivia spoke directly to the camera.

“If you’re watching this, we’re already gone. But not in the way they’ll tell you. We disappeared for a reason.”

“They tried to silence my sister’s case. Bury it. We wanted to make sure no one forgets.”

“We’re going dark — completely. Somewhere they can’t find us. No phones. No credit cards. No trails.”

“Don’t look for us. Just listen to what we left behind.”

The screen cut to black.

Lena leaned back in her chair, heart pounding.

They hadn’t vanished. They had erased themselves — on purpose.

To make noise by becoming silence.

The resort released a statement. “We are cooperating fully with authorities. Our hearts go out to the family.”

A lie in a press release.

But Lena didn’t file the video as evidence. She stored it in a sealed folder and wrote one sentence in her final report:

“Case unresolved. Possibility of voluntary disappearance.”

She stood one last time on the rocks by the ocean, watching the tide breathe in and out. Somewhere, far from the headlines and lies, two lovers had chosen vanishing over fighting a system that never listened.

And in their silence, they’d finally been heard.