There was no time for my sister and I to talk in the morning. My parents and my lawyer called us downstairs for coffee pretty early, and then my mum wouldn't let me out of her sight, constantly hugging me and kissing my cheeks.

"Why is the –" I started, noticing that the curtains were pulled across the floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the lake.

"The media are out there on boats," Michael Rappini replied, understanding what I was asking about before I could actually do so. "You can't stay here, Emma. The local police are overwhelmed, all their officers are out here dealing with this and the road outside is blocked with media vans, the locals are getting upset. It's just going to get worse if you stay."

"Well where should I go?" I asked. "I can't go back to my flat at –"

"Oh you definitely can't go back there," he agreed, glancing at my parents as a cue.

"We thought you might come back to Norwich with us," my dad said gently. "Not for good, we understand you probably want to finish your degree at Grand Northeastern, but just for a few months until this dies down a little. You'll obviously have to talk to the police before –"

"I don't want to talk to the police," I said before he could finish, which triggered an exchange of concerned glances.

My mum took me by the shoulders and looked me in the eye. She looked worried and that made me feel bad, but I knew she was a lot less worried than she had been before I came back. "Emma," she said, "we know you've probably been through a lot. We're not pressuring you to talk about it just yet, there's going to be time for you to go at your own pace. But you do need to speak to the police –"

"Why?" I asked, turning to Michael. "Am I under arrest? I'm not, am I? So why do I have to talk to them? I don't want to. I just want to get the hell out of here. Take me home, take me wherever, but get me away from all those people outside."

Michael looked at my mother and raised his eyebrows and I saw that they'd already discussed how to deal with me in the best way possible.

"Em," she said, stroking my hair. "You don't have to tell us anything right now but you do – darling, you do need to talk to the police before we leave. Your friend is still missing, and even if you have no idea what happened to her I think you can understand why it looks to the police like you might have some information on –"

"It will also help with the media," Michael added. "If they find out you're leaving without talking to law enforcement it's just going to throw fuel on some of the crazier theories out there. Sitting down with the police – and I'll be there with you when you do – will give the impression that you're doing everything you can to help find Paige Renner. And that will go a long way to helping shape the narrative of –"

"Shape the narrative?" I asked, smiling at the odd, PR-ish language being used. "You mean shape the narrative as in make it seem less like I'm the one who killed her? I didn't, you know. I didn't kill Paige Renner. She's not even dead! She's fine! She –" I stopped myself short, then, as eyebrows shot up.

"You," my dad started, "Emma – you know where Paige Renner –"

"No!" I wailed, wishing I was alone so I could kick myself for blabbering so carelessly. "I mean – no. No, I do not know where Paige Renner is. I only know she's – actually I don't even know that, either. Please. I'm just tired. Can we get back to talking about that other thing? About going back home?"

It was Michael Rappini's turn. He gave me a small, concerned smile and patted the back of my hand. "I can see you're upset, Emma, and that's fine. Everyone here understands that. But it's important you tell us – even just one of us, if that would make you feel more comfortable – if you have any information about Paige Renner. You're going to need to sit down with the FBI again, and if I go in there without all the information, I won't be able to do my job properly. I won't be able to –"

I was about to lose it. The reunion with my family – the simple relief of seeing their simple relief – was turning out to be a lot more fraught and complicated than I had hoped it would be. Yes, they knew I was safe and that was still the most important thing. But it didn't look like I was going to be able to fly back to the UK and spend the next few weeks ensconced in the safe warmth of the family home, unperturbed by reporters or police or crazies. Not without talking to a whole bunch of people I really didn't want to talk to, anyway. I rubbed the bridge of my nose and listened to the sound of my heart beating in my chest, as fast and nervous as a hunted deer.

"Alright," Katie suddenly spoke up from where she'd been hanging back at the periphery, observing. "Let's – uh, let's leave this for later. I think Emma needs to sleep for a little longer – don't you Em? Come with me, I'll take you back to bed and we can deal with this a little –"

"I'm sorry," my dad said, and when I looked up I could see that he really was sorry, and that he wasn't enjoying this any more than I was. "I'm sorry Emma, but we don't have a lot of time. More and more people keep arriving, and the police have asked us to leave. If we don't leave soon, I get the feeling they're going to stop asking and start ordering and I just don't want to put anyone – especially you – through that right now."

Katie wrapped a protective arm around my shoulder and I could have wept for gratitude. "OK," she addressed the people in the room. "She understands. But we need a few minutes, a half hour or an hour maybe, alright? If you can get things organized to leave, that's fine. If she needs to talk to the police tell them we can talk about that. But right now, Emma needs to be safe."

"Right," my mother agreed. "Michael, can you tell the man from the FBI that we need Emma to be safe and comfortable before we even begin to talk about –"

"Mrs. Willis," Michael responded. "It's not a good idea to leave here without –"

"Mr. Rappini!" My father snapped and my sister, before I could hear anything more, ushered me out of the kitchen and back to the bedroom as the bickering voices of my parents and my lawyer faded out of earshot.

"This is so messed up," I whispered when she'd shut the door behind us. "Oh my God, Katie, this is such a mess. I shouldn't have come back. I should have – I don't know, sent a message or written a letter or something to let you know I was OK, but I shouldn't have some back. I don't think I can deal with –"

"You can send letters from the past?" Katie asked suddenly, which made me chuckle in spite of the shit-storm swirling around us. She was always doing that – asking tangentially related questions in the middle of conversations about other things.

I slumped down on the bed. "No. Well – yeah, no. But I could have left a letter by the, uh – in the woods by the – never mind. I could have done it, maybe."

"Why don't you just tell the police you don't remember?" She prompted and I gave her a look.

"Because you saw what happened to Paige – and you heard what the lawyer said – it'll just be pouring fuel onto a fire. And what will mum and dad think? That something so awful happened to me that I blocked it out? Besides, I basically just admitted I know where Paige is, in front of them."

"You can just say you were confused," my sister told me. "It's only a day since you came back, they'll buy that."

"So – what?" I asked, as we sat there postponing the inevitable, which was leaving the lake-house and going somewhere – anywhere – else in the full glare of the media and police presence outside. "Do you believe me now?"

Katie laughed a little. "Christ, Emma. You do know how you would have reacted if it was me telling you a story about time-traveling and Viking boyfriends, don't you? You wouldn't even have taken it seriously, you wouldn't have told me to get help – you'd just have told mum and dad and then the three of you would have commenced taking the piss out of me for it for the next, I don't know, four decades?"

She wasn't wrong. "Yeah," I replied, because there was no point in denying it. "You're right. I've acted like an asshole to you over that stuff, Katie – the ghost, the tea-leaves. I still don't even know if I believe in ghosts or tea leaf reading, if you care, but I can tell you with certainty that I no longer think my own beliefs are the final word on – well, on anything."

My sister fished a sweater out of one of her bags and tossed it to me. "Here," she said. "Put this on, it's cold out there. And I don't know if I believe you, Em. You don't seem crazy to me – you just seem like Emma. And I have to admit that none of the other theories really make any more sense. I know you. I know you'd be acting differently if you didn't think you knew your best friend was OK. I know you'd want to talk to the police, to help them find her. And I also know that soppy look you get when you talk about some boy you fancy. That's how you looked when you talked about Rans – Ram –"

"Ragnar."

"Yeah, Ragnar. What an odd name. But yeah, you had that look when you talked about him. You've got it again, now."

I looked away, embarrassed. Even though we were both grown women in our twenties, my older sister was still more than capable of making me feel like a bashful little kid.

* * *

Just over an hour later, we left. All of us – me, my parents, Katie and Michael Rappini. Newly hired security guards surrounded me and hustled me to a waiting car with blacked-out windows, which I thought to myself would have been pretty cool if the situation wasn't so serious and scary.

Not that having their view of me blocked stopped the ravenous reporters from swarming like angry wasps – or from photographing my family and Michael. They shouted questions at all of us, some of them so offensive they took my breath away.

"Did your daughter kill Paige Renner?! Sir! Ma'am! Mr. Willis! Did Emma murder Paige Renner?"

"Emma! Were you having a sexual relationship with Paige? Were you two sleeping together?"

"Why won't you talk to the police, Emma? Why won't you answer our questions? What are you hiding? Do you have something to hide, Emma? Do you know how it looks to refuse to talk to the police? Emma! Emma! Emma!"

I hunched down in the back seat of the car, Katie on one side of me and my mum on the other – my dad and Michael Rappini were behind us in a second car – and they both put their arms around my shoulders and glared as cameras flashed and equipment bumped against the darkened windows as the press tried to jostle their way into position to keep trying to get a clear photo of me.

A few minutes later, when I felt the car had gotten up speed and there was no more yelling, Katie tapped my back.

"OK," she said. "They're gone. The police didn't let them follow us."

My sister sounded out of breath, like she'd been running – even though she hadn't. And when I looked up I saw that her and my mum both had identical expressions on their faces – wide eyes, open mouths.

"My goodness," my mother whispered, opening her purse and taking out a small container of headache pills, one of which she popped into her mouth. "That was ridiculous. That was –"

"Crazy," Katie finished for her. "That was crazy. They've never been that intense before. You and dad have to hire more security."

The car sped down the road and I watched the tall, slender shadows of the leafless winter birch trees whizzing by outside the window. The further we got from the lake-house and the media and law-enforcement siege there, the more relaxed I began to feel. Not relaxed, mind you – just more relaxed than a hunted animal. And just when I felt myself beginning to doze off, a familiar sound filled my ears and jerked me back to a state of hyper-alertness. The helicopter. It was back.

"Fuck!" Katie wailed, peering up and out of the window. The situation was so dire at that point that mum forgot to comment disapprovingly on her swearing. "Mum! Tell the police to call it off – call that lawyer, tell him to –"

"He can't," my mother replied grimly. "He already told us that – the police don't get to tell the media they can't use their helicopters – that's why they had to put a no-fly zone over the lake-house. They can't declare a no-fly zone over the entire state. That's what Mr. Rappini said."

The next few hours were up there with the worst of my life. A hotel had been booked in the largest town within driving distance of River Falls, but my dad called from the car behind us to let us know Michael had just received a call informing him that the media were already massing there, awaiting our arrival. Someone had leaked our booking. Instead of heading for the hotel, then, the cars just drove around, trying to keep ahead of the baying mob that pursued us until we could come up with another plan.

At one point, Katie started crying and something about seeing her cry – especially when it came with the knowledge that I'd come back precisely because I wanted to spare my family any further suffering – made my whole body tight with rage.

"This shouldn't be legal," I said quietly as the car veered down a random exit ramp and my mum, not a woman prone to emotional meltdowns, spoke to my dad and Michael on the phone, desperately trying to figure out what to do before we ran out of gas and ended up on the side of some road, being torn to pieces by vultures with cameras and microphones.

In the end, it was a scene out of a farce that saved me from my pursuers. My mum took off her distinctive bright red jacket and her hat and I put them on, taking care to tuck all my hair beneath the hat. We pulled in at a roadside diner as the helicopters hovered and 'I' – actually my mum in my clothes – got out and ran to the car behind, whilst my sister and I remained in the first car.

And it worked. The choppers all went after the second car as Katie and I sat in the first one, our hearts in our throats, watching, waiting to see if any of them would break off at the last minute and decide to stick with us. None did.

"Good," Michael Rappini said, breathing a sigh of relief down the phone. We'll have someone call your driver within 5 minutes, to tell him where to take you. By the time the press realizes their mistake, they won't be able to find you. I'll see you later today, if this works.

Sure enough, the driver received a call a few minutes later and Katie and I found ourselves, about an hour after that, being driven into an underground parking garage beneath the ridiculously named Sleepyhead Hotel, located somewhere in upstate New York. Our driver then led us down a series of corridors to room 206 and pulled the drapes shut before turning the lights on and telling us to sit tight until my parents and Michael arrived.

We did as we were told.

"Well he seems to know what he's doing," Katie commented after the driver left the room to stand guard outside the door. "I wonder how much he's costing mum and dad?"

She hadn't meant the comment the way I took it, I knew that. I knew she was just making very awkward conversation in a very awkward situation. But for some reason it just hit me the wrong way and I bowed my head, swallowing against the urge to cry again.

"Oh!" Katie said, horrified. "Oh, Em! I didn't mean it like that! I didn't –"

"I know," I replied. "I know. I just feel so fucking bad right now. Look at all this shit. Look what's happening. This is my fault. I came back to make you all feel better and instead I've just brought this chaos down on your heads!"

"No," Katie shook her head. "No, Em. This isn't your fault. And if you're wondering if it's worth it – to know you're safe? It is. Of course it is."

We fell into a period of silence after that as we both tried, in our own ways, to wrap our heads around everything that had happened over the past day. It didn't feel like a day. It felt like a week, two weeks. And for all the fear and confusion, all the fleeing and hiding – what had been achieved? Nothing. What problems had been solved? None. We were probably going to have to flee again soon, when the media inevitably found me – and it didn't sound like ignoring law enforcement requests for an interview and flying back to the UK to hide out in my parents' attic for the next couple of years was a workable plan.

I was actually relieved when Katie picked up the remote and turned the TV on, imagining we could find some cheesy action movie to lose ourselves in. I didn't recognize what I was even looking at right away. I mean, I did recognize it – a pursuit of some kind, the high camera shot from the helicopter, the car darting down a highway – I just didn't immediately connect it to me. It was Katie who did that, shrieking and covering her mouth in horror.

"Oh no," I whispered, as I realized the pursuit I was watching was live, and that the quarry was my own parents and lawyer. My sister began to weep openly but all I could do was stare at the screen, frozen with horror, as a sedan tried fruitlessly to outrun a helicopter. There were a lot of police cars, too, forming an escort around the lone car.

My sister and I watched, our eyes wide and our hearts beating fast, as the car took an exit off the highway and pulled into a gas station parking lot. Another helicopter buzzed through the shot as a chyrons rotated across the bottom of the screen:

"MISSING STUDENT EMMA WILLIS FOUND"

"EMMA WILLIS SAID TO BE IN GOOD HEALTH"

"EMMA WILLIS IN AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION"

"EMMA WILLIS REFUSING TO TALK TO FBI"

"EMMA WILLIS A SUSPECT IN PAIGE RENNER'S DISAPPEARANCE?"

Katie moved to turn the TV off but I grabbed her wrist, unable to look away. "Don't."

So we both watched as the helicopter camera zoomed in on the car, on my mum and dad and Michael Rappini as they stepped out, until the shot was so tight I could see the fear on my mother's face and the barely-contained rage on my dad's.

"It – uh – it looks like Emma Willis isn't in this car," the male reporter's confused voice spoke to the announcer in the studio.

"Are you sure, Jim? Is she still inside it?"

They went back and forth like that, speculating on whether or not I was sitting in the sedan or not as I actually sat in a hotel room having the most surreal experience of my life. Within minutes media showed up in their own vans and my sister and I watched as the police frantically tried to keep them back. The officers weren't so much interested in protecting my parents as they were in preventing a riot in a random gas station parking lot.

When my mother broke down and started to cry, her face creasing in full, close-up HD, my stomach turned and I ran into the bathroom to retch fruitlessly into the toilet. When I came back, the TV was off.

"Hey," I said, gagging slightly once more. "Katie, turn that back –"

"No," she said. "We don't need to see this. You don't need to see this. I can't believe this is happening. This is the craziest thing I've ever seen, Em. What are we going to do?"

What were we going to do? More specifically, what was I going to do? I was the reason it was happening. My parents were being chased by helicopters because of me. My sister and mother were crying because of me. Sure, it wasn't my fault in some larger sense, but those were still the facts.

"Give me your phone," I barked at Katie, determined that this circus around my family end at once.

"What? Why? Emma, I don't –"

"Give me your phone."

She gave it to me, then, and I dialed 9-1-1 with one shaky finger.

A female voice picked up a couple of seconds later. "9-1-1, what is the nature of your emergency?"

"This is Emma Willis."

Katie reached over to me and tried to snatch the phone back out of my hand but I ducked away and went to the bathroom, locking the door behind me before she could get it.

"I'm sorry," the 9-1-1 lady said, "can you repeat –"

"This is Emma Willis," I said again. "You know, Emma Willis who just turned up after disappearing? Emma Willis whose parents are on the TV right now? Emma Willis who got kidnapped by aliens? You know, that Emma Willis. And I –"

"Ma'am, I'm going to need you to calm –"

"No!" I shouted. "Listen to me! This is Emma Willis, I am in room 206 at the Sleepyhead Hotel in – actually, I don't know where it is. But I'm here. Tell the police if they want to talk to me I'm here. I'll let them in. I just want this to end. I just –"

"The Sleepyhead Hotel, ma'am? Is that the –"

"JUST TELL THE POLICE I'M HERE AND I'M READY TO TALK!"

I hung up the phone and opened the bathroom door. Katie was on the floor, her knees drawn up to her chin. "Do you think that's a good idea?" She asked. "I mean, without that lawyer here – without any legal representation?"

"I don't care," I sighed. "I didn't kidnap Paige. I didn't kill her. If the police need to hear me say it, if that means we can all go home, then I'll say it. They can film it and write it down and do whatever they need. And hey – I actually didn't do anything to Paige, so it's not like they've got some smoking gun they can spring on me!"