A few nights later, after my parents called to tell me they were hiring a private security company to provide me with 24/7 protection – on top of that provided on-campus by the university, I found myself tumbling down a rabbit hole. Not just a rabbit hole, either, but the rabbit hole. The one I'd been avoiding for weeks – the internet. My mum and dad both refused to articulate why it was, exactly, that I needed even more security and it was that refusal, combined with the genuine worry in their voices when we spoke, that led me to break my personally-imposed moratorium on reading about the Paige Renner case online.

Within minutes and the most cursory of Google searches I had tens of thousands of pages of news results – and even more of non-news results. Crime discussion forums, blogs, Twitter conversations running for days and days, endless YouTube videos uploaded by random citizens – some more interested in objectivity than others – it seemed that most of humanity in the western world had talked of little else for weeks on end. I wouldn't have thought it possible for people to be more obsessed with the mysterious case of Paige Renner than they had been the first time she turned up missing, but they were. If anything, the tone was now even more hysterical. There were whole sites dedicated to occult theories – Paige and her baby had been kidnapped by satanists, her father had sold them both into slavery and then killed himself out of guilt, beings from another dimension had taken them, Paige was a virgin and her son the new messiah. What I'm saying is, there was a lot of truly insane stuff floating around, and it wasn't difficult to find.

The other thing that wasn't difficult to find was the camp (there seemed to be numerous different camps in the 'what happened to Paige Renner' world of online speculation) who seemed certain that I, Emma Wallis, was responsible for everything. The text messages had leaked, people were interpreting the reminder Paige sent me to wear natural colored clothing as some kind of coded cry for help. I had been there when she sent the texts, they said, holding her baby at knifepoint, forcing her to compose messages that would allow me to get away with the crime. Not that any of them bothered to go into how those texts in particular had allowed me to weasel out of my guilt, of course.

The death threats were numerous, detailed and thrown out almost casually by people who lived across the world from me, people who had never met and would never meet me. Some of the more legitimate news websites had stories about these death threats. I scanned headlines. 'Paige Renner's Best Friend Living In Fear For Her Life.' 'Emma Wallis In Hiding' 'What Did Emma Know?'

I wasn't hiding, though. I wasn't in fear for my life. Not then, anyway. And even after reading some of the truly vile things that had been written about me online, it still didn't quite seem real. Surely nobody could just believe that I had something to do with Paige coming to harm, could they? Without any evidence?

That night, I went to bed bemused more than upset, still disbelieving that anyone except the genuinely delusional could think I did something wrong. I knew how the internet could exaggerate things, make it seem like a few crazies were a real movement in the real world. And I had even more security by then. Things would be fine. I would be fine. I just need to wait for the storm to pass. That's all.

As if laughing at me, the next day the world sent me a message about the accuracy of my naive assumptions. I was leaving the Arts building in campus, buoyed by a conversation with one of my professors about my final paper, with my private security guard a few feet behind me and the guard provided by Grand Northeastern already waiting for me by my car. I noticed the couple walking towards me the way you notice anyone sharing your space – they looked like fellow students and I didn't think anything of them.

But just as they were about to pass me, at the very last minute, one of them turned to me suddenly and spit in my face as the other began filming on their phone. In less than 2 seconds (although it somehow felt a lot longer) my guard had knocked the spitter to the ground, but this hadn't stopped either of them screaming at me, hurling awful accusations in voices that were dripping with hate-filled certainty.

"Murderer!" "Baby murderer!" "Bitch!" "Cunt!" If I'm not mistaken, I'm pretty sure I even caught a "Satan's whore!" thrown in for good measure as I furiously wiped spittle off my face with my gloved hands. And of course, the ruckus attracted attention and very soon there were other people moving in to observe – many of them with their phones out. The other guard arrived and they both set to restraining the two crazies, making sure I was OK and admonishing the people nearby to stop filming. Which, obviously, no one listened to.

I stood where I was, shaking with rage, wanting desperately to lash out at the two people who were pinned on the ground – still spewing expletives and trying to wriggle free of the guards' grips – and filled with a strange kind of loneliness as everyone around just stared at me. No one offered to help – in hindsight, they were probably too shocked themselves, or maybe they thought the guards would not want them to intervene – but I remember their blank eyes as they looked at me. Oh, their faces said. It's her. Paige Renner's friend. The last person to see Paige Renner alive. The one who might even have had something to do with Paige Renner's disappearance. Paige Renner. Paige Renner. Paige Renner.

I sank to my knees and covered my face with my hands until more campus security arrived to disperse the growing crowd.

Almost two hours later, after Michael Rappini and the police had been called and statements taken from myself and several witnesses, I found myself next to my car with the former, who looked deeply concerned, and two security men standing a respectful few feet away.

"Maybe you should go home for Christmas?" Michael said. "Things are just getting crazier and crazier and I don't know how long it's going to be before the public latches on to the next big thing. It could be awhile."

It wasn't that I didn't want to see my parents, or that I didn't want a break from what was becoming near-constant vigilance for media, crazy people, gawkers etc. – it's that I had plans to spend Christmas in America with my friends and roommates. It was our senior year and we knew this would be our last holiday season together before we all scattered to the four winds to start building our post-college lives – and I was damned if I was going to let anyone ruin that for me.

But standing there that night and seeing the look on my lawyer's face made me question myself for the first time, and in spite of the stubborn streak I had inherited from both parents.

"I don't know," I replied slowly, too exhausted to feel much of anything by that point. "Maybe. I'll call them tomorrow."

"Think about it," Michael said, giving me a stiff, professional hug. "And call me if you need anything, or have any questions. But I do think you need a break from all this, Emma. It's not healthy."