“Gav, you need to calm down and tell us what’s going on.” Ian shoved me down into a chair and I bounced back up again, unable to keep still.

“She’s gone. She left.” I dropped my head in my hands. “I can’t believe she fucking left.”

“What are you talking about?” Jules grabbed my face and forced me to look at her. “You already told us that Dani went home. What are we missing?”

My fingers dove through my hair, tugging. I wanted to pace, but there wasn’t enough room. There was barely enough space to breathe in this tiny office that the eight of us were crowded in. “She said goodbye.”

“Yeah, you’re gonna have to give us a little bit more than that,” Ben said drily, his hip resting against the edge of the desk.

How the hell could I make them understand? Where did I start? If I thought it would do any good, I’d be speeding back to Manhattan, but her disconnected phone told me everything I needed to know—she’d left. It was the only reason.

“Dani has been running from something.”

“From what?” Rachel asked, hair falling forward as she tilted her head to the side.

“I don’t know.” I sat down in the chair Ian had tried to manhandle me into before. “I know she’s been running for most of her life. I know she was shot when we were at SU, right after she disappeared last time. I think it has something to do with her mom being murdered, but she would never really give me a straight answer about it all. She said it was too dangerous.”

“Rach.” Ian glanced toward the door. “Go get your laptop.”

She left the door hanging open, only closing it when she’d returned, laptop cradled in her arms. Sitting at the desk, she powered up her machine and started typing. “Okay, so Dani. Is that short for Danielle? What’s her last name?”

They looked to me.

“Winters. But that’s not her real name.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what is.”

“What about, um, a birthday?”

“It’s sometime in the summer. July, August maybe.”

“Okay, let’s try this a different way. Tell me what you do know about her.”

I rubbed a hand over my forehead, wracking my brain. “She went by Dani when we were at Syracuse, too. Different last name there though. Then it was Sommers.”

“That helps.” She didn’t look up as she typed. “It could be nothing, really, but there’s a commonality between the two names.”

Ben snapped his fingers. “Seasons.”

“Right.” A line creased her forehead as she concentrated. “Typically, when someone needs to change their name a lot they try to stick with a theme, things that are similar so it’s easier to be remember. So, what I can do is write an algorithm that will search for different variations on seasons and weather, pair that with Dani, Danielle, and other deviations of similar names. If there’s any other information you can give me I can add that in, make the search more specific.”

“Well, I mentioned her mom. And, oh, she said she grew up in the city.”

“Her father,” Daphne piped up from her spot next to the bookshelf. “She said he was the only family she has left.”

“What? She said that?” I whipped around and had to meet Daphne’s gaze by leaning dangerously far back in my chair.

“Yeah. You were sleeping and I accused her of being afraid of meeting Mom and I said something really nasty about, didn’t she have a mom? And she was like, she’s dead. So, I asked about her dad and that’s what she told me.”

I looked back to Rachel. “She never told me anything about her dad.”

Felix drummed his fingers against his armrests in an agitated rhythm. “She never mentioned seeing her dad? She was in the city by herself?”

“Well, no.” I had to stand again. My shoulder bumped Ian’s as I shoved past him to get to the window. “She’d get these text messages and she’d have to disappear at a moment’s notice.” I held a hand out toward Ben. “That’s why she took off when we were at the Hamptons. Last night, too.”

“And you never asked where she was going?” Felix frowned.

“Of course I asked. I asked half a million times at least. But she never told me anything, always told me it was too dangerous for me to know anything. Hell, it wasn’t until a week ago that she showed me where she’d been living.”

“You know where she lives?” Rachel perked up. “I need you to go there.”

“What? Why?” I scooped a pen up off the desk and proceeded to click it—click-click, click-click, click-click, click-click. “It’s not like she’s going to be there. I’d lay money on it.”

“Obviously, or you’d already be there.” Daphne pursed her lips.

“I don’t think she’s there,” Rachel clarified, her fingers still tap, tap, tapping away at the keyboard. “But I’m hoping she left something there. Bills, her old phone, anything. Actually.” The typing stopped. “I have to go with you. If there’s some miracle that her cell phone is there and it has a SIM card and she left it in the phone . . . I can’t get anything off it remotely.”

“I don’t have a car.” Click-click, click-click, click-click.

“We’re all going,” Ben announced, punctuating his sentence by standing up. “None of us can help if we’re here.” He clapped a hand on my back. “I know I gave you two a hard time, and as difficult as this might be to believe, I really had your best interests at heart.”

“You’re right, that is pretty difficult to believe.”

Bianca scooped up her phone. “Well, while you two kiss and make up, I’m going to go grab my bags. Meet back down here in five?”

Rachel slammed her laptop closed. “Let’s go.”