I decide to make one o’clock in the morning the official time Zoe disappeared since it’s the last time I can remember checking my watch last night.

When the twenty-four-hour marker arrives, I take a cab down to the police station to fill out a report.

When I walk into the building located in the center of town, about ten miles away from my loft, I find the place busier than I expected at such a late hour. Phones are ringing, uniformed cops are hauling in handcuffed criminals, and two women are in a heated argument about who punched who first.

As I’m walking through the main entrance, I almost step in the pile of puke.

“Oh, my God! Gross!” I jump over the vile smelling puddle right before my shoe lands in it.

A guy hunched over near the glass entrance doors lifts his head and glares at me, wiping a trail of puke from his chin. “You want to see gross? I’ll show you gross.” He undoes the button of his pants then moves to his zipper.

Before he can get it undone, an officer strides across the room and forces the guy to put his hands behind his back.

“Come on, Doug,” the officer says, dragging the guy toward a heavy metal door located across the room. “Don’t make me write you up for public indecency again.” He pauses at the receptionist window and asks her to buzz them in.

When the heavy metal door glides open, Doug lets out a string of barely comprehensible remarks as the officer gently pushes him through the doorway. As the door starts to shut, Doug turns around, blows me a kiss, and then sticks out his tongue.

I cringe, utterly disgusted. I’ve never been in a police station before. For some reason, I didn’t think it would be so intense, and I thought the criminals would be out of sight, out of mind.

“Can I help you?” the middle-aged receptionist with black and grey streaked hair asks, yanking my attention away from the door.

I walk up to the open plastic window she’s sitting behind. “Yes, I need to file a missing person’s report for my best friend.”

She sifts through a stack of papers. “How long has she been missing?”

“Just over twenty-four hours.” I set my purse down on the counter. “Which is long enough that I can file a report. I know. I checked.”

Looking a bit annoyed, although I’m not sure if it’s toward me or toward the chaos everywhere, she asks me the same questions the operator did. Then she opens the top drawer of a filing cabinet, grabs a few papers from inside, sticks the papers onto a clipboard, and sets it onto the counter in front of me. “Fill out these forms.”

“What happens after I fill out the papers?” I ask, picking up the clipboard.

She holds up a finger as the phone begins to ring. “Just a moment.”

Irritated, I march over to an area with chairs and a vending machine, and take a seat as far away from everyone as I can.

“All right, first name, Zoe …” I start to fill out the form, but pause above the middle name section. Shit, I don’t know if she has one.

I fish my phone out to text Nora to see if she knows, but she doesn’t.

Dammit. Not a good start.

I decide to not fill out that section and move on to the next question, crossing my fingers that Zoe doesn’t have a middle name. The farther I get into the form, the more questions I have to skip. Besides Zoe’s name, current address, work place, and her description, I don’t know very much about her. Not even her age because she refused to tell me.

“Age doesn’t matter, Jessa,” she said when I asked her how old she was. “It’s just a number that tries to force us to keep track of how many days there’s left until we die. But you know what, I refuse to keep track. When I die, I die, and a number isn’t going to have anything to do with it.”

The way she said it gave me an ominous feeling, as if she knew she was going to die. But I convinced myself I was overreacting because my freaky storm death intuition made me too paranoid about supernatural things.

Reaching the end of the form, I slump back in the chair and dig out my phone again to text Nora some of the questions I skipped, needing to see if she has any information.

As I’m opening the text message, I get the oddest feeling someone’s watching me.

I dare a glance up and see the guy sitting across the room from me drops his gaze from me and focuses on the floor.

Weird.

I squirm in my seat as I redirect my attention back to my phone and finish up the text to Nora. When a few minutes tick by and she doesn’t respond, I call her, but she doesn’t answer.

“Nora, call me back ASAP,” I tell her voicemail. “I’m filling out this missing person’s report for Zoe, and I don’t know all the answers to the questions. I’m hoping you do, or else I don’t think anyone is going to take this seriously. The receptionist already looked at me like I was some stupid girl trying to report her best friend running off with a guy she met at a bar.”

I hang up and return to the form. I end up sitting in the chair with my head down, restlessly tapping the pen against the clipboard and praying Nora will call me back.

“Come on, Nora. Call me back …” I trail off, the feeling that I’m being watched overcoming me again.

This time when I glance up, I lift my gaze without raising my head. The guy across from me doesn’t react fast enough and our gazes lock.

I elevate my brows at him. Yeah, creeper, you’re so busted.

I expect him to look away, but he just stares back with a smirk, and then he winks.

I eye him over, wondering if I know him, or if he’s just being a cocky jerk.

He looks a couple years older than me and is dressed head to toe in black, like he just came from creeping around a dark alley, doing God knows what. He has the hood of his jacket pulled over his head, but draws it off when he notices me studying him. A deliberate smile curls at his lips.

Cocky creeper or not, it’s hard not to notice how attractive he is. Well, if you like the whole bad boy, rebel, I-walk-on-the-dangerous-side look.

The longer the staring goes on, the more I want to look away, but I can’t seem to tear my eyes off him.

Continuing to hold my gaze, he reaches up and sweeps his black hair out of his dark eyes. I notice he’s wearing fingerless gloves, and that his fingernails are painted black. I guess it kind of goes with his whole cargo pants, clunky boots, rebel look.

He quirks a brow, rolling his tongue in his mouth. I don’t know what he seems to find so amusing.

I start to float to my feet, heading over to ask him, or talk to him, or … something. My head feels so foggy right now.

“Zane, you’re up,” the receptionist calls out, shattering the moment into pieces.

The guy flashes me a cocky smirk before pushing to his feet and lazily strolling over to the front desk.

“I love that we’re on a first name basis, Ceceil,” the guy—Zane apparently—tells the receptionist, trying to dazzle her with a charming smile. He doesn’t have an accent, making me question if he’s from the States like me. “It makes this place feel almost like home.”

“It should feel that way to you,” she mutters, typing something into the computer. “You’ve spent enough time here.”

“Most of that was for good reasons, though. And in the end, it turned out fantastically.” He rests his arms on the counter, grinning at her. “Don’t you think?”

She sighs as she looks up from her computer. “You can go back now. They’re expecting you.”

Leaning over the counter, he steals a sucker from a jar on her desk. Then he strolls toward the heavy metal door, throwing her a wink. “As always, Ceceil, it’s been a pleasure.”

The door buzzes open and he steps through, glancing over his shoulder at me. His eyes sparkle with amusement as he pops the sucker into his mouth and winks.

Dude, this guy seriously has wink issues. Either that or maybe he just has a twitchy eye.

I look away and fix my eyes back on the clipboard until I’m certain he’s gone. By then, Nora is calling me back and some other guy is staring at me, this one a lot less attractive, and one who definitely has a twitchy eye. And vomit on his shirt.

“Hey,” I answer, moving a few chairs down from creeper dude.

“Why do you sound like you’ve been running?” she asks. “Wait, you didn’t walk to the police station, did you?”

“No. It’s, like, ten miles.”

“Yeah, I figured you didn’t, but still … you sound breathless.”

“I sound freaked out. This place is …” I trail off, realizing the woman beside me is shamelessly eavesdropping on my conversation. I twist to the side and bring my knees up on the chair to get some privacy. “Anyway, I really want to get this taken care of so the police will start looking for her, but there’s some questions on the form I need help with.”

“Yeah, I know. I got your message. And I really want to help you, but I don’t know any more about Zoe than you do.”

“You don’t know any answers to the questions I sent you? Not a single one?”

“Sorry. I wish I did, but … well, I think out of all of us, you probably know Zoe the best. If you don’t know the answers to those questions, no one else is going to. I found that out when I had to look for her.”

Her words send a high dose of discouragement through me. I hate that Zoe’s missing. That only I seem eager to find her. That everyone thinks she chose to leave. Most of all, I hate that, if we hadn’t gone out last night, none of this would be happening.

I suck in a breath, fighting back the tears burning my eyes. “Okay, I guess I’ll just fill out as much as I can and see what they say.”

“I’m so sorry you have to do this.” Pity fills her tone. “I wish I could help you more, but I just don’t know Zoe that well.”

“I understand.” I hang up and put the phone away, frustrated, angry, and exhausted.

I haven’t gotten a drop of sleep since I woke up disoriented. Part of me hopes maybe this is all just a dream and that I’m really back at home, lying in my bed, asleep. When I wake up, Zoe will be blasting music in her room, and I’ll get up and yell at her to turn it down, like I do almost every morning.

The longer I stare at the form, listening to the shouting and chaos filling the police station, the more aware I become that I am wide awake and living this hell, not dreaming it.

Grimacing, I push to my feet, walk up to the front desk, and set the clipboard down on the counter.

“All done?” Ceceil asks, glancing up at me.

I nod. “There are a few questions that I can’t fill out.”

She scoops up the clipboard and reads what I wrote. “You barely filled out half the form.” She flips the papers over then frowns. “Are you sure this person even exists?”

I gape at her. “You think I’d come in here and file a missing person’s report about a fake person?”

“You’d be surprised how much it happens. People these days get their kicks and giggles off some messed-up stuff.” She looks down at the form again and mutters, “You didn’t even put down a birthdate.”

“That’s because Zoe has this thing with her birthday …” I shake my head, my frustration rising. “You know what? This doesn’t matter. I filled out the form like I was supposed to, which means you guys have to look for her, right?”

Setting the clipboard down, she eyes me over suspiciously. “It’ll take me a while to put this information into the computer and assign an officer to the case, so you can either go home and wait for us to call you, or”—she points a finger toward the waiting area where a guy is jumping up and down and singing “Yankee Doodle”—“you can go wait over there.”

My jaw ticks. “Fine. I’ll wait over there.”

“All right, I’ll let you know when someone is ready to talk to you.” She reaches to close the window.

I turn around and head back toward the madness filling the waiting area, telling myself I can handle this. That I have to for Zoe. That while this place might be crazy and scary, she could be in a place way, way worse.

I slump down in an empty seat near the window and stare outside at the semi-busy street. Zoe, where are?