CHAPTER EIGHT

5 DAYS AFTER LILY REED'S DISAPPEARANCE

THURSDAY, JANUARY 13, 2022

9:58 PM

"Do you know how close she was?"

"Tiffani, dear, we didn't even know that she was still looking into it." Tonya Reed's voice carried over through the phone lying face-up on Tiffani's kitchen counter. The counter surrounding the phone was littered with the newspaper scraps and other odds and ends that Tiffani had found in Lily's basement. And, displayed on her laptop to its fullest brightness, was Booker Lane_REAL.docx.

"We told her to stop looking into it years ago." Marshall Reed shouted.

"You don't have to yell, Marshall. Tiffani can hear you." Tonya whispered.

Lily's parents had been like second parents to Tiffani for over half of her life. She had received dozens of worried phone calls from them in the five days since Lily had vanished, but this was the first time she had been the one to reach out to them. The second she had been let out of the station just before 5:00 AM, Tiffani started working through everything she had about Lily's mission to figure out what had happened to her older sister fifteen years before.

"There was dust on the desk when I went down there, but she had definitely been doing something with the newspapers and everything in the past few months." Tiffani said, remembering the light layer of dust that had covered Lily's basement desk; it couldn't have been more than a few weeks of buildup. "Did she talk to either of you about it? Even in passing?"

The phone was silent for a few seconds as the Reeds thought.

"I really can't remember anything." Lily's mother said finally, "I'm sorry, Tiffani. Do you think that has something to do with this? Do you think they found Lily?"

"No, I don't think so." She responded immediately, wishing she truly felt the confidence that her tone was putting forth, "I definitely think this is a separate thing."

But she didn't. Melanie Pinewood's murder had solidified Tiffani's theory that this was connected to Anna's abduction. Someone who was publicly speculating about Lily's true identity was killed hours after it was brought to the public's attention? Nothing else made sense.

But she couldn't tell the two people who had given up their entire lives to protect their daughter that their efforts had been for naught.

"Okay. That's good. But we'll let you know if we remember anything about Lily's searching."

"Thank you. I'll talk to you guys later."

"Okay, sounds good." Lily's father said, "We love you, Tiffani."

"I love you both too."

She hung up the phone and returned to where she had been in reading through Booker Lane_REAL.docx. Tiffani had decided to try and find differences between the document and the official, published book by reading them both side by side. She was on the second to last page of Chapter 2, and nothing was different. Tiffani was starting to worry that in their desperation to find Lily, she and Barry had attached too much meaning to this oddly-named document. True, Lily would never have named any version of her book with 'REAL' tacked onto the end, but maybe she had been rushed and just named it whatever came to mind first.

But Tiffani was going to go through the entire thing, word for word, and see what changed. Because something in the back of her head told her that this was the key. Even if she couldn't tell what it opened quite yet.

Her phone buzzed and she glanced at the screen.

Shit, Tiffani thought, is it about Lily or Melanie?

She liked Barry's message before texting Porter.

Tiffani turned her phone off and placed it back on the kitchen counter. She took a deep breath and returned to Chapter 2 of the Booker Lane_REAL.docx.

She finished the chapter with nothing different from the physical copy of Booker Lane that she was comparing it to. Sighing, she moved on to Chapter 3. The chapter where the younger sister, Hannah, decided to go after her older sister Nellie's kidnapper herself.

Tiffani read the first paragraph before jumping back to the top of the page. Her heart started racing and she immediately highlighted the first sentence of the chapter:

If no one was going to take her seriously, then Maddy would find Anna herself.

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6 MONTHS EARLER

SATURDAY, JULY 10, 2021

5:02 PM

"I want to show you something."

As the last of her housewarming party guests trickled out the front door, Lily took Tiffani's arm and practically dragged her to a large door that had remained closed during the house tour. Lily took two keys out of her pocket. She handed one to Tiffani and used the other to unlock the door.

"Lil, you're being weird." Tiffani said, following Lily down the stairs. "Why do I have a key to your basement?"

"Because I need you to have it. No one else has one, not even Barry."

"Why?"

Tiffani's question was answered the moment that she looked up and saw Lily's old desk from her childhood home sitting in the corner. The desk was littered with open notebooks and reprinted newspaper articles from the early 2000s; it was a familiar sight.

"I thought you weren't doing this anymore." Tiffani said warily, "You promised your parents you would let up."

"And since you're not my parent, I'm telling you that I'm not giving up." Lily said firmly, planting her hands on her hips as she surveyed her workspace. "I have everything I need to figure out why Anna was taken. I just have to put the pieces together." She turned to face Tiffani, her expression both determined and nervous. "I'm showing you this so that someone else knows why it's here. No one has touched Anna's case in years. I'm going to figure out what happened myself."

Tiffani nodded.

"Alright. I'm glad you told me."

"Me too." Lily smiled, "Now let's get back upstairs before Barry finishes doing the dishes and wonders where we disappeared to."