It’s a cliché, but the internet is a dangerous place. Even fully grown adults several times older than Brianna are routinely victimized by increasingly sophisticated and creative criminals lurking behind computer screens. Teenagers, even the ones who have reached that pinnacle age of legal adulthood, are vulnerable to the many pitfalls that come along with seemingly endless access to information, communication, and validation. All of which are things they deeply crave. While I am a strong proponent of privacy and individuality, that is never at the expense of safety, especially for people at the highest risk.

  Parents who insist on transparency are taking an important step in standing between their children and these dangers. While it’s clearly not always effective, it is a critical step. I’m banking on that kind of protectiveness from Christine, and when I call her, I’m rewarded with exactly the information I wanted.

  “I’ve already looked at it,” she admits. “One of the first things I did when nobody could get in touch with her was log in to her profile and see if there were any conversations that might give us a clue. Or even arguments she could have had with somebody.”

  “Do you think that she could have been arguing with somebody? Is there someone you are concerned she could have been having a problem with?” I ask.

  “No, nobody specific. She hasn’t told me about anybody or anything. It’s just… I worried that something bad might have happened, and if there was a conversation or something like that on her profile, then it could give us direction. But when I looked at her page, there wasn’t anything. She has a few friends that she keeps up with from when she went to camp when she was younger, but they don’t really talk about anything serious. Then there are some people from school, but it’s the same thing. The conversations with her good friends were pretty surface-level. There were a few things in there that sounded like they had been talking about something negative, maybe her breakup, but I think that for the most part, they talk in person or text,” she says.

  All the words tumble out of her in a long, fast stream. It’s like she can’t keep a hold of her thoughts.

  “I’m still going to check it out, just so I know what’s going on.”

  “That’s fine. Anything you need to do,” she says.

  “Who are you talking to?” Kenneth asks in the background.

  “It’s Agent Griffin,” Christine says.

  “Did she find her? Does she know something?” he asks.

  “She’s still investigating. She called to get the password to Brianna’s social media.”

  I decide not to tell them about what I found at the venue. As much as I value keeping people informed about cases involving their loved ones, there’s also a point when it can be more harmful than beneficial. I don’t think it would do any good for them to hear about her getting stuck outside of the building and trying to sneak inside. At this point, it would only cause them more anxiety. If something else comes up that I think could be valuable, I will let them know, but for now I’ll keep my disclosures to a minimum.

  I log in to Brianna’s profile and start searching through the conversations. I’ve gone through the last couple of weeks when a text comes through on my phone. I don’t recognize the number at first, then I realize it’s Ethan. I push aside my aggravation that he’s texting rather than calling me back when I read that he’s willing to meet up. I send a text back with the name of the bakery and let him know I’ll be here for a while longer.

  I don’t actually know how long I’m planning on sitting here, but if it’s enough to bring him to me, I’ll keep hanging out. I’ve finished my lunch, and the woman, who I’ve noticed is doing everything around the shop, comes to the table.

  “How was everything?” she asks.

  “It was really delicious. I’ve never been here before. It’s such a cute place.”

  “Thank you,” she says. “I’m Scarlet. This is my bakery.”

  “Well, I really enjoyed my lunch.”

  “I’m glad. Is there anything else that I can get for you?”

  “I’ve been thinking about dessert, but I don’t know what to order. Someone’s supposed to be joining me pretty soon. Do you think you could put together an assortment of what you’d recommend?”

  “Sure. Any specifications?” she asks.

  “No, I trust you.”

  She smiles and walks away. When she comes back, she has a plate overflowing with various pastries, cupcakes, and cookies. She swaps my coffee cup for a full one.

  “I picked out a little bit of everything.”

  “That’s perfect. I hope you don’t mind me kind of spreading out like this,” I say.

  “Not at all. It looks like you’re doing something important. Writing a novel?” she asks.

  I can’t tell if it’s a genuine question or if she’s just mining for details and that’s the placeholder she figured would get me to respond.

  “No, nothing as creative as that. I’m investigating a case. I’m an FBI agent.”

  Her eyes go wide. “That’s incredible. You go ahead and stay here for as long as you need to. We’ll set this place up as your overnight headquarters if you want to. And you know what? I think that what you’re doing is absolutely creative. How are you going to solve anything if you don’t think like them?”

  Scarlet glances over her shoulder at a couple just coming through the door and looks back at me.

  “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  She rushes behind the counter, and I pluck a mini chocolate tart off the platter. I’ve just set it on one of the smaller plates Scarlet perched on the side of the table when I notice a teenage boy come into the bakery. He glances around and makes eye contact with me. I can’t imagine this is a hot hangout for the local teens, so I’m assuming this is Ethan. I wave, and he comes over.

  “Agent Griffin?” he asks.

  “Yep. And you’re Ethan?”

  He nods, and I gesture to the empty part of the booth. “Have a seat. Help yourself to a snack. Do you want a coffee or anything?”

  He shakes his head. He looks nervous. “No. You said this was about Brianna.” He’s ready to dispense with the niceties and get right into the conversation. I appreciate that.

  “It is. Obviously, you know that she is missing, and I’m sure you figured out that I am looking into it.”

  “Yeah, I get that. But why? You’re FBI, right? Why would the Feds be investigating Brianna?”

  “I’m not investigating Brianna. I’m investigating her disappearance.”

  “Why do you need to talk to me? We broke up a few months ago,” he says.

  “That’s actually exactly why I want to talk to you. I know that you broke up, but you were together for a long time, which means you know Brianna very well. I also know that things had gotten fairly contentious between the two of you recently. I know that you exchanged texts on Friday and then talked on the phone. What can you tell me about that?”

  He’s reaching for an apple strudel and rolls his eyes slightly as he sets it down on the plate in front of him. He licks icing from his fingertips and rubs them on a napkin on the table.

  “That wasn’t even me,” he says.

  “It wasn’t you?” I ask. “We have her phone records. We saw the text message and know that she called your number. We also have video footage of her making that call.”

  “Yeah, I know she sent a text to my phone and got a message back. And she called my phone. But I didn’t send that message, and I didn’t talk to her. At least not for most of the conversation. It was Amy.”

  I remember the name from the text Brianna got.

  “Explain to me what happened,” I say.

  “Like I said, we’ve been broken up for a couple of months. So I started seeing other girls. I’ve been hanging out with Amy for a few weeks. She was over at my house on Friday, and I had gotten up to make some snacks. That’s when Brianna messaged. I left my phone in the living room. Amy checked the message and decided to respond to it. When I came back into the room, Amy was on my phone talking to Brianna. I took the phone from her, and Brianna was pissed. She yelled at me about being rude and disrespecting her. She accused me of cheating on her. I tried to tell her what was going on, but she hung up on me,” Ethan says.

  “Were you surprised by that reaction?”

  “Not at all,” he says without hesitation. “Brianna has always been… explosive. In good ways and bad. She might be bubbling over with excitement and love-bombing you, or she could be raging. Not all the time. I mean, there were times when she was just normal. But when she wasn’t, she really wasn’t. And I know us breaking up was really hard on her.”

  “How about you?” I ask.

  “I mean, yeah, it sucked. We’ve been together for a really long time, and she’d pretty much been one of my best friends that whole time. But honestly, I was pretty over the whole thing by the time we finally broke up. Things just weren’t good between us anymore. We were always arguing, and if I wanted to go somewhere, she insisted on being with me. Like I couldn’t just hang out with my friends or go to parties or anything.”

  “And were you cheating on her?” I ask.

  He looks a little surprised at my bluntness, but I stay silent, waiting for a response.

  “Yeah,” he finally admitted. “I mean, that’s what she called it. I wasn’t sleeping with anybody or anything. I just went to a party when I was visiting my brother at his school for the weekend and ended up making out with a girl. We kept in touch for a couple of weeks. That was literally it. But Brianna totally flew off the handle about it and acted like it was the biggest betrayal that had ever happened. I just couldn’t deal with that level of drama anymore. I mean, I know that I did something wrong. I know I hurt her. But I guess I just didn’t see it as that big of a deal. Besides, it’s not like she’s been sitting at home pining away for me.”

  That comment sparks my interest.

  “What do you mean? She was dating somebody else?”

  Nobody I’ve talked to has told me this, and it may be critical. If Brianna is dating someone, I need to know who it is and where they are.

  “I wouldn’t call it dating,” he says. He takes a bite of the pastry and then sits back, holding his hands up like he’s trying to demonstrate his innocence. “Now, I’m going to put it out there that I don’t actually know anything. I’m just going by what I’ve heard and some things I’ve seen.”

  “I’ll need more details than that,” I tell him. “I’ve gone through her phone records and through her social media. I didn’t see anything that made it seem like she was in a new relationship.”

  “You went through the one with her name on it?” he asks.

  I raise an eyebrow over the rim of my coffee cup as I take a sip.

  “The one with her name on it?” I ask, lowering my cup back to the table.

  “Yeah. It just says ‘Brianna K. Wright.’ K is for Katelyn.”

  I wake my tablet screen back up and open the profile I was looking into. Turning the tablet toward him, I gesture at the profile.

  “This one?”

  He leans forward slightly to get a better look at it. “Yeah, that one. That’s her regular profile. The one she gives everybody.”

  “Which, I’m guessing, means she has another one?” I ask.

  “I guess you probably know her parents have the password to her profile?”

  “Yeah, that’s how I got to look at it.”

  “Well, you don’t really think she would talk about everything she wants to talk about and be honest about her life on something that her parents could see anytime they felt like it, right? I mean, she wouldn’t have private conversations or vent about the things that are really bothering her. She knows that it’s not really private. Her parents insisted on being able to check everything since she got social media, so she learned how to work around it,” Ethan says. “She has a fake one.”

  “Do you know how to access that profile?” I ask.

  “No. I mean, not that I can log in to it or anything. And she blocked me there, so I can’t even look at it. You should ask Samantha. I’m sure she still keeps up with it.”

  “You said that there were things that you just heard about. What kinds of things?” I ask.

  “Like I said, that she’s not home pining for me. I’ve heard she’s out being very friendly with a bunch of different guys who don’t go to our school.”

  “How did you hear about that?” I ask.

  “A guy at school told me. He said he was using his cousin’s profile and saw he was friends with someone who looked a lot like Brianna, so he looked at it and verified it was her. She was dressed slutty, and everyone on the profile was a dude.”

  “But you said Samantha knows about it and that you were on it at one point but she blocked you,” I say.

  “Yeah. I mean, I was on it when we were together, but then she blocked me after we broke up. I’m guessing that’s when she really started loading it up with guys since I didn’t see anything like that when we were together, but I don’t know.”

  I’m still internally cringing at the casual way he threw around the idea of her “dressing slutty” and the implications of that statement, but I force myself to move on.

  “During your relationship, was there ever any violence?” I ask.

  “Are you accusing me of something?” he asks.

  It’s far from an unusual question when it comes to conversations like this, but I wasn’t quite expecting that fast of a leap.

  “No, I’m asking questions so I can contextualize,” I tell him.

  “No, there was never any violence. Not from either one of us. Even when she was being particularly crazy, she never put her hands on me. And I would never hurt a woman.”

  I’ve always disliked that rhetoric. Perhaps because I have physically come to blows with far more men in my life than I have women. But I don’t like the suggestion that it’s noble for a man to declare that he would never hit a woman but with the subtle statement that he reserves the right to assault a man and that would be perfectly acceptable. Maybe even admirable.

  “Did Brianna ever tell you that she was afraid of anybody or about any friends you hadn’t met?”

  “I don’t know if I would say friends. But she would talk about people that she went and hung out with. That was a fun double standard of hers. I wasn’t supposed to go out with anybody without her, but she could tag along with the girls to wherever, and I was supposed to be perfectly fine with that. She never gave me any specific names or details.”

  “What do you think happened to her?” I ask.

  “I wish I knew. We were going through a pretty rough patch, but that doesn’t mean that I just stopped caring about her. She still means a lot to me, even if we aren’t together. No matter what, she’s always gonna be my first love.”

  After Ethan leaves, I reach out to Samantha again. I ask her about the second social media profile, and she confirms it. She says that Brianna did have a second one at one point, but she stopped using it and removed all her friends from her contacts list because she thought that somebody’s parents might find it.

  “Why didn’t she just delete it?” I ask. “If she was so concerned about getting caught, why didn’t she just delete the whole thing rather than removing people from her contacts list? I’ll admit, I’m not the most well-versed in the world of social media for your generation, but isn’t that the entire point of having it? You’re supposed to be keeping in touch with your friends and interacting. Being social? If she removed all her friends, what would be the purpose of having the profile?”

  There’s a long pause, and it’s obvious Samantha hadn’t thought of it that way.

  “I don’t know. But it wouldn’t be too difficult for you to get into it. I can give you the profile name and the e-mail address associated with it. I don’t know the password, but you could figure it out.”

  “How?”

  “Brianna has a terrible memory. She always said she didn’t mind as much that her parents had the password for her public account because she would have to save it on her computer anyway. She could never remember it off the top of her head. When she started the second account, she needed a way to remember it, so she used a code. It’s the same thing she uses to remember her locker combination and other personal information.”

  “She uses a code?” I ask.

  “It sounds insane, I know. But it was actually recommended in one of our internet safety classes at the beginning of high school. They were trying to give us tips to keep ourselves safe while being online, or at least that’s what the slideshow said. Anyway, one of the things they recommended was to keep all our passwords and access PINs, things like that, saved somewhere but using a private code so that you could figure it out, somebody you gave your private code to could figure it out, but others wouldn’t be able to.

  “She told me about hers once. She thought she was being really clever, but it was actually really simple. If you can find a list of phone numbers anywhere, look for the names Susan, Patricia, Constance, and Laurel. None of those are people she actually knows. Ignore the area codes. The numbers after that are a password. Just take the number, coordinate it with the letter of the alphabet, and there you go. Not exactly military-secret-operative level, but it’s functional.”

  “Do you know which of those names would be associated with the account?” I ask.

  “I don’t know for sure, but I would guess Laurel. She was in one of our classes freshman year and used to talk about her secret profile like it was some sort of big mystery that everybody would want to solve. Of course, the fact that she talked about it all the time meant that it wasn’t secret and nobody actually cared.”

  Samantha gives me the email address associated with the second profile. I thank her and end the call. I already know where to look for the phone numbers. I’ve already seen them. Reaching into my bag, I pull out the journal Christine gave me when I went to her house to talk about Brianna. I was hoping for more in-depth insight into her thoughts and maybe some hints of where she could have gone, but when I read through the journal that night, I didn’t find much. Since it was new, there were very few entries, and they were basically just recaps of her days. A few lines of alternately pining over Ethan and raging about how much she hated him, but mostly just what she did and some drama she heard about.