a/n - i'm cringing, i know that it's been a week since i updated. i know i said i'd try to get updates up quicker and i'm sorry about that guys. it's been yet another hectic as hell week and i'm trying, i really am.

this chapter is a slight filler but it gets a lil cooler towards the end, so even if it may sound a little ramblish and irrelevant at first, i'm hoping you all stick around until the end because this chapter has yet another clue that'll help you all out later on. more suspects to add to the list, is all i'll say.

it's really interesting reading your guys' theories on what's happened to el and em, tbh :-)) what'd you guys think of emma going missing?

enjoy guys, i'm sorry i've been so off the grid lately. thanks for sticking around.

stay happy,

bri x

-

[ cara ]

I puffed my cheeks out and took a break from walking in a repetitive, endless loop of a circle around the neighborhood, the stack of "Missing ; Emma Graylinn" flyers heavy in my arms. We'd been at it for the past twenty-five minutes now and I felt like dropping to the sidewalk and playing dead - maybe some sympathetic human being would have enough pity to come drag me home.

What? This was getting depressing, okay, it's heavy on the soul.

It'd been a solid twenty four hours since Emma had gone missing and the police hadn't given us anything back yet. They were so positive and confident in ruling it a kidnapping but without any evidence to actually help support themselves, they were practically running in circles. Thus why Mrs. Graylinn, my Mom and I were currently parading around the whole community taping these flyers up - I had a really killer headache. In fact, I've been having a lot of them lately - Mom just brushes them off as side-effects of the antidepressants.

Regardless of what happened two days ago, I still really cared about Emma and I really wanted to be like, a helping part of this case but at the same time, I just wanted to go home and forget any of this ever happened. I'd just gotten released from the hospital this morning and a lot of my body was still feeling pretty sore and weak, which sucked. More so than that though, it was starting to feel like everything was just slowly beginning to pile and pile and pile - Elena and Emma are missing, Heather has a kid, I have GAD, Mali and Jack are getting married in two and a half weeks, Michael's being a douchebag towards Luke because of Emma, and I'm in love with my sister's boyfriend who doesn't love me, but thinks he loves me, which makes me think he loves me when he really doesn't love- sorry, moving on.

Piles can only get so big until they topple over, and that was my biggest fear at the moment. I was currently waiting for one more tragedy to set as the candle on top of the cake and cause everything to crumble. Any minute, now.

Elena was the first one to go missing, and now Emma was gone. Was there supposed to be a connection between both? Elena and Emma were best friends, it seems kind of ironic to think that they both went missing within the same month. What if the same person had taken both of them? Better question, why would they have kidnapped them? When it came down to it, all Elena and Emma really had was money. Elena was the daughter of the governor and Emma was the daughter of two lawyers who'd started their own company. They both had debit cards that were connected to their own bank accounts which both contained a pretty damn lot of money. If someone had threatened the both of them in exchange of money, El and Emma would've been able to give however much a person who was low enough to kidnap two teenage girls would need within the swipe of a plastic card. They both would've been freed by now, right? It wasn't clicking, none of it was making sense.

Paige sighed loudly, and pursed her lips as she moved her head around panoramically, scanning the entire neighborhood we'd just littered with flyers. "I think we're finally done here."

"I think so too." Mom nodded slowly in agreement, rubbing Mrs. Graylinn's back gently. She'd been taking all of this pretty seriously, to be honest, and I don't blame her. Emma had always been like my Mom's third child from what I've seen. She was always over for dinners, always part of strictly-family parties and movie nights, showed up to all of Dad's campaign conferences and speeches - if Emma flung herself off of a bridge my Mom would probably encourage me to follow her suit, considering how much she admired her. It was all hitting her pretty hard. "We have a lot of flyers left, though, do you wanna hit the next town? How're you feeling, Elena?"

"I'm actually a little tired," I said quietly, but truthfully. "is it okay if I just head home? My head is kind of pounding, I'm sorry."

I could tell Mom was about to throw the request down and tell me to suck it up, that I'd only been walking around for half an hour or so, but Paige beat her to it. "Of course, don't worry about it. Go home and rest."

I smiled gratefully at the older, more tired-looking replica of Emma and Mom sighed, eyeing me less than impressively. "I'll stay here with Paige and help her out some more. Just let Dad know."

I nodded, grinning lightly at the both of them before turning around and making my way back across the street towards our house. I felt emotionally drained.

Walking up towards the front steps, I took note of the extra black car parked in the driveway and the familiar black hair and dark skin leaning against the garage doors. I wanted to smile and feel my heartbeat pick up in excitement, I really did. Instead, my palms just started to sweat.

I'd come to accept the fact that everything Emma had said before I'd landed myself in the hospital was true, and it was still a little difficult to be around Calum and not feel like the shittiest person known to mankind, you get what I'm saying? But we've all felt it before, right? The feeling where you kind of just know that you've gotten yourself way in too deep to stop? Like an addiction, per say. It's like, you know that it's bad, it's so bad, but you also know that no matter how many times you tell yourself to stop, you won't. So you just live with it no matter how painful it is. And you end up hating yourself for it, because you know that it isn't doing you or anybody else for the matter any good. It sucks.

Once I'd reached the front of the house, mere steps away from Calum, I cleared my throat and smiled as he snapped his head up in my direction. He outstretched his arms and I walked in-between them, allowing him to wrap his arms around my shoulders and press his lips to the top of my head. "Your Dad told me to just wait out here until you got back. Said you went for a walk with your Mum."

I nodded absentmindedly and let out a deep breath, willingly letting Calum pull me into his chest even further. I shut my eyes and let myself enjoy the feeling of his hoodie's material against my skin. If I weren't so tired, I probably would've asked why the hell he was wearing a black hoodie in the eighty-degree weather. "I'm tired, my muscles are pulsing."

Calum grimaced, "Pulsing?"

"Yeah, pulsing."

"What the hell, what kind of a verb is that?"

I tilted my head upwards to peer up at him, my eyebrows raised curiously. "What's your point?"

"When I hear the word pulsing, I think of like, a gorilla."

"Calum, I'm gonna start crying right here, right now."

"I'm serious!"

"A gorilla? Like the Bruno Mars song?"

Calum laughed loudly and slowly swayed the both of us side to side, his arms still latched around my middle. He was so caught up in his fit of giggles that he couldn't even say anything further - I rolled my eyes and pulled harshly on a thick strand of his hair, snorting when he whined loudly. "My muscles are pulsing, and I am a not a ferocious beast who stars in a Bruno Mars song. Deal with it."

"I'll have a doctor check out your pulsing muscles after you explain something to me, first." Calum muttered into my hair before pulling away and maneuvering me so that we were standing face-to-face. Suddenly, he looked a lot more serious than two minutes ago. I eyed him cautiously as he reached into the pocket of his sweatpants to pull out a piece of paper that I knew all too well. I must've sold it all out to him by the way my eyes tripped in size. Shit.

"What's this?" He asked simply, holding up a piece of paper with Emma's face smack in the center and capital, red letters spelling out 'MISSING' along the bottom edge.

Calum rose his eyebrows at me expectantly after a moment of me staring at the paper in disbelief and silence. I bit my lip, shifting my eyes back up to meet his hesitantly. "You weren't exactly supposed to see it yet."

"They're taped all over your neighborhood, El."

I groaned loudly and brought my hang up to rub at my forehead. Damn it, why didn't I think of that earlier?! There are currently two forty-year-old women on the loose about to road trip all across the state to put these up!

We really hadn't come up with a way to tell any of the boys or Heather or any other Graylinn family/friends about Emma disappearing yet - it was still kind of a thought in progress. I'm not gonna lie, we were actually considering telling everyone that Emma and her parents had an important family emergency thing to attend to in Nevada and that they wouldn't be able to make it to Mali's wedding. I cursed under my breath - Mali.

"You can't tell your sister!" I quickly spat out and kept my eyes locked on him, pleadingly and desperately. "You can't say a word about this yet, okay? It'll completely throw her off track! She'll be so worried about Emma being missing she'll stress herself out with her wedding like, two weeks away! It's going to ruin everything for her, Calum, she shouldn't have to stress about something like this mere weeks before her wedding. Promise me you won't say a word to her!"

Calum narrowed his eyebrows, looking rather annoyed. He parted his lips like he was on the edge of saying something, but sighed and smoothed his hand across his face instead. "Elena, this is the second thing you've asked me to keep a secret from her, I can't just-"

"Right, sorry, speaking of secrets, this is going to sound so bad, but there's one last secret, if you will, that I've known about for a while now that we should probably, um," I cleared my throat and trailed off, rolling my lips back. Calum's eyes widened, like he'd actually caught on to the idea that I was keeping more from him. He looked just about done with me, his brown eyes were narrowed and his head was cocked to the side. It was obvious that he wasn't one for secrets in general, let alone in a relationship, but this was as good a time as ever. The problem was figuring out a subtle way to tell him that Heather had a kid.

"Elena, hey!"

"Not now, Heather!" Calum and I both yelled at once, keeping our eyes trained one another. Calum's eyes were filled with aggravation while mine looked slightly terrified. And then I blinked, and scrunched my face up, suddenly realizing we'd both just said. Rewind, what?

I turned to my left, towards the driveway where another car had suddenly parked its way in front of my house. A blonde girl in a pair of light-wash jeans and a gray v-neck stood not far from it, the exact same piece of paper that Calum had in his hands clutched tightly between her fingers.

I wasn't focused on Heather standing there at all, though, or the fact that yet another person had found out about Emma vanishing (we really had to take down those flyers).

I was more so focused on the tiny, miniature doll-like version of her standing at her feet, dressed in tiny capris and a tiny white tank top with tiny white sneakers on her feet and she was so, so damn tiny. Her small arms were wrapped around Heather's lower legs and the poor girl looked absolutely miserable, to be honest, with the high-pitched whines coming out of her mouth and the way her head was angled so that one side of it was pressed against her knees. The other side was still visible to my eyes though, and I was still able to make out the green eyes that matched Heather's perfectly, and the little amount of blonde hair that was just enough to create a small loop of a bun at the top of the little girl's head. She was practically a little baby, a little Heather.

Paisley.

"She has a kid." I swallowed, using all the willpower I had in me to avoid looking at Calum who I already knew was gawking at me with eyes wide and sharp enough to cut through me. "That was the secret. Heather has a kid. And she's standing right in front of us."

-

"So is there any news on it yet?"

"No, not a word." I let out a deep breath, staring down at my feet in attempts of avoiding Heather and Calum's eyes that I knew were both strictly focused on me. "It all just happened yesterday night, though. It's probably going to be a while before we hear anything."

Heather dropped her head so that her hands were now cradling it and Calum grunted loudly, turning to me pleadingly. "What, are we just not going to tell Mal anything? She's gonna wonder why she's missing an extra bridesmaid, El."

"We'll tell her that Em had a family emergency in Nevada." I shrugged, going along with the plan that Mrs. Graylinn had brought up earlier this morning. "We can't break news like this to her two weeks before her wedding, she's going to stress over it."

Heather nodded slowly before scrunching her nose up, "Nevada?"

I rolled my eyes, "Okay, where would you like her family emergency to be, Heather? Thailand? Oklahoma?"

"I was thinking like Maine or something, but okay, chill, Nevada works too." Heather rose her hands up at her sides defensively.

"Hold on, put that on pause," Calum cleared his throat, turning to eye Heather like she was a threat to him. "you have a kid?"

"Mhm." Heather shrugged apathetically and peered down at her fingernails, like the question was something she'd heard too many times before and had gotten too used to answering.

Calum tilted his head and knit both his thick eyebrows together, "Didn't you graduate like a month ago?"

"How about we focus on the fact that I graduated high school, with a two year old girl on my hands, rather than the fact that I had a kid while I was in high school? Didn't you drop out?" Heather lifted her eyes from where they were focused on her cuticles to grin sarcastically at Calum who slumped down in his seat, clearing his throat. I refrained from chuckling. Damn.

"How's it going?" I asked, genuinely concerned.

She exhaled and blew her cheeks out, shaking her head. "I don't know. It's hard, I guess? My Mom and I have been looking preschools to enroll her in. I took her to the doctor's recently, too. She has asthma."

Calum made a wounded sound and frowned, "Well shit."

"Yeah." Heather pursed her lips together. "You know, when you have a kid, you can't go shopping every week at expensive stores. You have to pay for their clothes, and their food, and their toys, and the best, most expensive out of all, my friends, their medicine. And I still have my medicine that I'm struggling to pay for, you know? It's heavy. I don't even have time to actually go out anymore. I wake up, take care of Paisley, work, then sleep. And it's going to be even worse once I start college. I have no time for anything else."

I bit my lip, not really knowing what else to say to her. She was making it seem as if she were at an all time low, and those are pretty difficult stumps to escape. "I'm sorry, Heather."

"If you ever need like, financial help..." Calum added on and nodded encouragingly at Heather. I grinned and tapped his knee playfully against mine. It was amusing recalling the time Calum looked at Heather and saw some sort of villain, and was now offering to help pay for her kid. Character development, I believe is what it's called.

"I really appreciate that." Heather nodded slowly, smiling softly at the two of us. "She's my daughter, though. I was the one who got knocked up. She's my responsibility. She's tough, but I love her, you know? A lot. If I had the chance to go back and do things differently, I wouldn't."

"You're doing a good job," Calum chuckled and peered down at the three foot blondie sitting at his feet, fumbling around with the laces of his boots. "she's pretty cute."

"She gets it from her Mom." Heather teased, wiggling her eyebrows teasingly. "That's um, actually why I came here in the first place. My Mom's working and I was supposed to drop Paisley off at her babysitter's since I have to meet up with Mali to run last minute details for the wedding, but the sitter fricking canceled on me at last minute. Would you guys like, mind...?"

Calum spoke up before I even had the chance to open my mouth, "No, not at all. Leave her here, go."

He turned and grinned at me, wiggling his eyebrows while Heather was sputtering out quick thank-you's and gathering her things, and I only rose my eyebrows at him challengingly, wordlessly asking if he knew what he'd just agreed to. I didn't know too much about Calum, truth. But I did know for a fact that he was traveling around the world ninety-five percent of the time and probably did not have too much experience when it came to kids, so to be completely honest, this could all blow up in flames.

He leaned into my neck and pressed his face against the skin there. "Practice for five years from now, you feel me?"

I scoffed and pushed the aggravating boy away from me, trying not to let his cackling push me into laughing along with him.

Unbelievable.

-

I cursed lowly under my breath as I outstretched my arm to its fullest extent, struggling to enclose my fingers around the fleece blanket on the coffee table to the side of the couch the three of us were currently laid across on (I was honestly shocked that Paisley, Calum and I actually all fit comfortably).

I exhaled quietly in relief once I finally got ahold of the blanket, and then slowly squeezed myself out of Calum's grip around Paisley and I; we'd all somehow ended up sandwiched asleep together with Paisley in-between Calum and I halfway through Paisley's choice of movie, which was Toy Story. Turns out for a two year old little girl, she was pretty cuddly. Gently, I laid the blanket overtop the both of them and grinned slightly seeing Calum pull Paisley in closer, who only whined lowly and pouted her lips. Calum spooning Heather's kid - I snickered at the sight. Who would've thought.

I toom a moment to stand in the center of the room, stretching my limbs out and waking them up from the roughly hour-long rest they'd just had, eventually exiting the living room quietly, not wanting to wake either child, and into the kitchen to search for something that'd make my throat feel less dry. Maybe lemon water?

I froze after turning the corner leading into the kitchen, seeing my Dad leaning against the island with a slip of paper in his hands and a "send-help-I've-never-felt-so-nervous" type of look smothered all over his face. Maybe I'm being overdramatic, it might've just been the wrinkles on his forehead.

I made a small noise at the back of my throat to indicate that I was here, yes, hello. Dad's eyes flickered up to meet mine, and I smiled briefly, giving him a small nod and taking a couple more steps until I was in front of the fridge. I was kind of feeling an iced tea now, to be honest.

"I take it things are going a little too well with you and Calum?"

I looked over my shoulder at my Dad who was staring back at me teasingly. My heart started to pick up, and it was really just then that I realized that it had become a familiar feeling. Was he actually playing around with me using what Emma had said knowing that it had triggered an attack before? I swallowed, and continued to pull the refrigerator door open, scanning the shelves for a juice-boxed ice tea. "What are you talking about."

"I don't know, you tell me," Dad chuckled from behind me. "you were both asleep together, cuddling a little kid when I checked in on you guys an hour ago. Did I like, fall asleep for nine months and miss you going into labor?"

I gasped and slammed the fridge shut after grabbing an iced tea, turning around to gape at the man to my back who looked strictly amused with a grin etched tightly across his face and all. Guess who wasn't laughing, though. "What kind of joke is that?!"

"A damn funny one, look at your face! You look like you're about to pee yourself."

"I am on the pill, Dad." I groaned, tearing the mini bendy straw off of the back of the juice pouch and poking it into the insert. I turned back around and sat myself down on one of the bar stools. "She's not our kid, okay, she's Heather's."

"Heather? Eighteen year old Heather who had dreams of going to Yale at fourteen?" He let out a sound that sounded a lot like a disbelieved, judgmental, surprised laugh and I exhaled quietly to myself. At the end of the day, I loved my Dad. I did. There was just a shockingly long list of things that irked me about the man, per say, his close-mindedness.

"Her name's Paisley," I said simply, taking a long sip, mainly to satisfy my thirst, yeah, but also to avoid telling Dad the entire story. It really wasn't any of his business. "Heather had her sophomore year. She had to go to work so she left her here and apparently she really likes Calum"

Dad rose both his eyebrows, looking unimpressed. "A bit early for her, don't you think? Kind of a shame, considering all the things she had planned for her-"

"She's still going to college." I spat, finding myself slowly getting more and more aggravated with him. He must've been a perfect man who kept a flawless record and has never once screwed up before, which definitely gave him the right to go around butting himself into other people's lives, correct? "She found a way to make up for the quarter of sophomore year she missed, graduated high school, has a job and is working her ass off, is managing a two year old asthmatic kid, and is still going to college. She's doing fine, Dad. End of story."

Just like any other time I shot something back at him, he didn't say anything for a while, until he eventually huffed loudly through his nose and pushed the piece of paper he was fumbling with earlier towards me, sliding it against the granite countertop. It had purple marker scribblings written all across it, and a name that was written so sloppily to the point where I couldn't quite make out the letters. I looked up at him curiously.

He cleared his throat, "Remember when you told me about how you and Emma found Elena's car in the school parking lot?"

"Yeah," I snorted, crushing the small paper box within my hand after I'd sipped all of the sugar out of it. "and you didn't believe one word. And you sent me to my room and told me to stay there for the rest of the night."

"Yeah, and then you snuck out and got away with it." Dad pointed out matter-of-factly. I felt my cheeks heat up. "That isn't the point. There was a lot on my mind that night, it'd been busy at the office and we were getting nowhere with Elena's case. Then, I came home to find that my daughter hijacked my laptop. Everything you were saying to defend yourself went in one ear and out the other. I didn't really process any of it, until today, when I walked out into the garage to get something from my car and I realized that Elena's car was missing. And then everything you'd told me that night about finding it in the school lot finally settled in."

I rose my eyebrows at him, wanting to know where he hell he was going with this. What was he trying to say? "Okay, go on."

"I sent a couple of my guys out to the school today and sure enough, there was her car. Just like you said." Dad snickered humorlessly, scratching at the top of his head. If I were an insensitive little priss who didn't care for sparing the dignity of her father all that much, I would've laughed. So I laughed. He ignored me, continuing, "I gave them a spare key that I'd been holding onto, because everybody and their mothers know how much of an oaf Elena is. I told them to search the car for any clues. All they found was this." He nudged his chin towards the paper in front of me.

I peered down at the paper again, thoroughly this time, and was able to make out the digits to a phone number, an address, and a couple more letters towards the top that I still couldn't fathom into words. I eyed my Dad, cluelessly. "I see numbers, an address and gibberish."

"Kariana." He said firmly, like he'd definitely figured this all out as if it were a puzzle. "Terrible handwriting, but I'm almost positive it's Karina. It's a phone number that has to belong to a girl name Kariana, who's correlated to this address, somehow."

"And why is this relevant?"

"Because this is the address of the factory that you got the fake SOS from, where we found the projector and the picture and the threat and the burner phones."

That caught my attention. I stared up at him, wide-eyed. Oh my God. "S-So Kariana, she's..."

"We don't know for sure. There's not quite enough evidence yet, but we have yet to call the number and check this out for itself. For all we know, this may not be what we think it is." Dad pulled his phone out of his pant pocket and held it out towards me. I took it, hesitantly. "I wanted to let you call."

I gawked at my Dad, eyeing the phone, and then back him, feeling a little more than shocked. "What?"

"I'm letting you call the number, Cara." He rubbed at his chin frustratedly. "It's only a matter of minutes before those two wake up, if you don't want me to change my mind, call it now. Ask if there's a Kariana in the household and put it on speaker."

He reached to grab the phone and unlocked it, opening the phone app and pushing it back towards me. I moved my fingers quickly, diverting my eyes back and forth from the number written on the paper and the phone keypad, tapping in the number. I took a deep breath before pressing the 'call' button, and pressing the phone to my ear. Dad cleared his throat once loudly, and I grumbled, pulling the phone away from my ear and pressing the 'speaker' button instead. It rang around four times before someone on the other end of the line picked up. I shot my head up at my Dad frantically and he only mirrored my expression.

"Yes, hello?"

I froze for a moment, not saying a word until my Dad eventually swatted my shoulder and I was instantly brought back to the ground. Was I legitimately talking to Elena and possibly Emma's kidnapper?

"Hi! Yes, this is, this is Elena Morales." I bit my lip and took yet another deep breath. "I-I was wondering if there was a Kariana in the household that I could speak to...?"

There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment, and then shuffling. I bit my lip nervously. "This is who?"

"Elena Morales." I repeated, eyeing my Dad from beneath my eyelashes who was now biting on his thumbnail nervously.

There were hella layers of static sounds on the other end of the line, it practically sounds like the American Horror Story theme song. I was still able to make out the small, almost inaudible if not listened to carefully enough, chuckle coming from the other person I was speaking to, though. "Brazil treating you nicely?"

I let out a long, shaky breath that I myself didn't even know I was holding, and turned to my Dad who was covering his mouth and staring at the phone intently with wide eyes. I bit down harshly on the inside of my cheek - what the hell was that supposed to mean?

"I-I'm sorry?" I choked out finally, after a couple of seconds of not being able to get anything out of my mouth, aside from wobbly breaths.

A quiet laugh, humorless and short. Yet again, almost inaudible. Then, more shuffling, and then the clearing of a throat. "Nothing. There's no Kariana here, Elena Morales. Don't call this number again. Spare yourself."

Then, the line went dead.