In early December, just before classes broke up before exams, I got a call from Michael Rappini, my lawyer. He was under instruction from my parents – who were paying his not insubstantial fees – not to contact me unless it was important. So I knew when I took the call that it wasn't going to be a chat about the weather.

"You need to come into my office sometime over the next week," he said, after we exchanged pleasantries. He sounded casual, but there was something forced about his tone.

"Oh?" I replied, mirroring his faux casualness. "Why's that?"

"Some people want to speak to you. I'll be there with one of my colleagues – I've already spoken to your parents about –"

"Who wants to speak to me?"

Something was up. I could hear it in the way he was choosing his words with extreme care.

"Uh, the FBI. It's routine, Emma. Your friend is missing again – and so is her baby and her father – and they're just doing their due dili –"

"The FBI?!" I exclaimed, hearing my own voice rising sharply. "The FBI? Why does the FBI want to –"

"Emma!" My lawyer cut me off. "Emma, slow down. OK? Listen to me. This is routine. You were her best friend and you told the police you saw her very shortly before she went missing again. You're not a suspect, it's nothing like that. They just –"

"Why do you have to be there, then?" I blurted out, terrified at the prospect of having to lie to an FBI agent – which is definitely what I was going to have to do if they asked me if I knew where Paige was. The local cop was bad enough, but federal law enforcement? No part of me was confident that I'd be able to pull that off.

But Michael Rappini Esq. was good at his job. He had the knowledge and the soothing manner that came from years of dealing with panicky, nervous clients. He talked me through the process, assured me I was not under any suspicion, that the FBI were speaking to everyone Paige knew so I was naturally going to be on that list of people, and reminded me that both himself and a colleague of his were going to be at my side the entire time.

Three days later, and after telling my parents it wasn't necessary for them to fly out from the UK to be with me, I found myself in Mr. Rappini's office, with him on one side of me, his colleague – a white-haired older man named Murray who would have made a great mall Santa Claus – on the other, and two FBI agents sitting across a table from us. Before I'd gone into the room, I'd been counseled to state that I didn't remember if any questions I didn't understand came up, or any that I didn't feel comfortable answering. I felt a little reassured by that, like I had a little fallback position if the FBI agents started getting too close to the bone.

At first their questions were routine, although I did notice that they seemed very interested in my relationship with Paige. Had we ever been 'intimate'? No. Had we fought before she went missing the second time? No. The first time? No. And they kept coming back to that point about a fight or a conflict, using different word combinations, slightly different tones of voice, to ask what was essentially the same question over and over. I didn't budge, because I was telling the truth.

Eventually, they got around to the actual day Paige had gone missing the second time – the day she took me – and her baby son and her father – back to the 9th century and only one of us returned.

"We'd like to ask you a few questions about Paige's phone records, if that's alright?"

I shifted in my seat nervously because I knew this was probably the part where I was going to have to lie, and nodded my head.

One of the agents – an enormous bald man who completely looked the part – pulled a sheaf of papers out and began to leaf through them.

"Here. She called you the night before, on her cell phone. A short call. Do you remember what you discussed?"

I told the officers Paige was calling to invite me to come over and meet the baby the next day, which was true. They asked me to confirm I had gone to Paige's house the next day and I did. They seemed satisfied – things seemed to be winding down. But just when I thought I was going to be given the go-ahead to leave, the other agent, a woman with a thick, frizzy brown hair and bags under her eyes, pursed her lips and looked at me.

"Paige texted you the next morning – yeah, here it is. 'Remember to wear drab colors – nothing bright! I know it sounds dumb but just trust me.' Can you tell us what that was about?"

What that was about was Paige making sure I wouldn't freak out any of her medieval friends by wearing a pair of bright fuchsia trainers or a kelly-green bobble-hat to meet them. Not that I could tell the FBI that.

"Uh, I don't remember." I said, averting my eyes from the agents' steady gazes.

"You don't remember?"

"No, sorry, I don't."

"Alright. Well I think that's everything for now, Emma. We may have some more questions in the future if you –"

Michael Rappini waved his hand in the air. "Yeah, you know the drill – call me, not her."

I began to stand up, relieved that it was over, and was about to head out of the room when the frizzy-haired agent spoke up again.

"You don't seem very upset."

I turned to face her, my mouth open, about to say something I probably would have regretted, when Michael jumped in.

"Come on," he said, addressing both agents. "You know better than that."

"It's a simple question Mr. Rappini. Her best friend is missing for the second time – and this time with her newborn son and her father – and your client hasn't shown a single sign of grief or worry throughout this whole –"

At that very moment, as I moved to approach the woman, angry at what she was implying (which I only later realized was exactly what she intended) and about to tell her she didn't know what she was talking about, Michael shot me a stern look, shook his head at me and guided me firmly out the door. As soon as it was shut behind us I started to protest but he shut me down.

"No, Emma. Don't do that. That's what they want. They want you to get emotional, to slip up, to say something that could give them a reason to question you further. And it's my job to stop that from happening. So the interview is over and you can go home now, unless you have any questions?"

I stood back, feeling slightly chastised even though my lawyer had a smile on his face. "Questions? Um. I don't know. Is that it? Are they going to need to talk to me again?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe. You haven't been following this, have you? The story, I mean – online, on the news? You haven't been paying attention?"

"No," I replied, because I hadn't been, not for weeks at that point. I wouldn't have been able to function. Of course the headlines were oftentimes impossible to miss, splashed across the top of this homepage or that newspaper lying on a campus bench. I knew Paige's second disappearance had caused a kind of national hysteria that only seemed to intensify as the days passed and wild speculation bloomed and spread like an invasive plant into the nooks and crannies of the collective cultural consciousness. The talking heads on the evening news shows were investigators and officials now, not politicians, and they couldn't offer anything beyond their own baffled statements that they a)had no solid signs of foul play and b)didn't have even the slightest clue as to what had happened to Paige Renner.

When I left Michael Rappini's office that evening, a man jumped out of some bushes in the parking lot and started snapping photos and shouting questions at me.

"Where is Paige Renner?"

"Did you have something to do with Paige Renner's disappearance?"

"Is it true that there are text messages of a fight you were having with Paige over a boy you both liked?"

Michael appeared before I could do anything dumb, sprinting across the asphalt and escorting me the rest of the way to my car using his jacket to block the reporter's view.

That incident was my first real hint that there was a newly direct focus on me in the media-created narrative of What Happened To Paige Renner.

"Do they think I had something to do with this?" I asked, shaken, once I was in my car and the reporter had been shooed away.

Michael shook his head. "Half this country thinks extraterrestrials took your friend, Emma. I would strongly advise you to keep doing what you're doing and stay away from any media coverage. Grand Northeastern is still paying for personal security, right?"

I nodded and held my hands up in front of me to confirm that they were trembling. They were. "Yes," I confirmed, "they are."

"Good. Go straight home and give your parents a call. Invite some friends over. Make sure you don't spend too much time alone."

I looked up at my lawyer, then, and asked him if he thought I had something to do with Paige's disappearance.

"Of course not!" He laughed, and I almost melted with relief when I could see he was telling the truth. "The police have nothing, Emma. Even if you weren't my client I'm smart enough to see there's no motive, no reason for you to have done anything wrong. I don't know what's going to happen – and by that I mean I don't know if they're going to find your friend – but I really don't think you have much to worry about beyond possibly another couple of conversations with our charming friends at the FBI."

Michael Rappini was a good lawyer. Not just in the technical sense of knowing the law, but in the sense of being very good at getting people to trust him, to open up to him. As he was standing outside my car that evening it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him. It would have been so easy.

"You're right," I could have said. "There is no evidence of any foul play because there wasn't any. They won't find Paige, though. She's gone. Gone where? Oh, the 9th century. She's a time-traveler, you see. Her baby's father is a Viking – she's gone back to be with him, and she took her dad, too. So yeah, that's the explanation. Do you think we should go back into the office and tell the FBI?"

But I didn't say any of that. I just gave my lawyer what must have been a rather pained look, thanked him for his help and his reassurances, and drove off. On the way back, I looped through River Forks again, past the Renner's house (there was only one lonely looking media van parked outside now, and I couldn't see any people at all) and down the road that ran the length of their property. It was as if I could feel the tree in the woods, calling to me. My friend Paige, the only person who could possibly understand what I was going through, felt simultaneously quite nearby and impossibly distant. Had she even thought about what it would be like for me? Had she understood that by inviting me over that afternoon – and taking me back to the past! – that she was setting me up for scrutiny from law enforcement and a rabid media? How could she not have?

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel even as I slowed at the point across the fields from her house where I could see the woods. Was I angry at Paige? I think I was. Part of me understood it wasn't her fault, what was happening to me. And part of me also knew that had she not told me where she was going, I would have spent the rest of my life wondering what happened to my best friend, torturing myself with worst case scenarios. But part of me was just angry she'd escaped and I was still there, dealing with things that weren't mine to deal with.

I pulled off the road and turned the car's engine off before I realized what I was doing. It was almost dark. What was I doing? Was I going to stumble across that snowy field again, with only the light from my phone to guide me, to – what? To go back in time? To lay my hands on the tree and confirm that I wasn't losing my mind, that it was in fact a portal into the past and I wasn't developing some obscure hallucinatory condition? And then what? Was I going to come back a few minutes later and everything would be fine?

In the dying light of the day I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror and couldn't help sighing. My hair was an un-brushed mess, piled into a lopsided bun on top of my head, and my eyes were ringed with dark circles from the effort it was taking to pretend everything was fine, just fine, nothing wrong at all.

"Stop being so bloody stupid!" I shouted at myself, out loud, as I turned the car's engine back on and pulled back onto the road, headed back to the shared apartment close to campus where I knew my roommates would be waiting for me with their worried faces and their kindly words that didn't help at all, no matter how much we all wanted them to.