Since we hadn't brought much with us, it was no time before Fiona and I had our bags sitting in the foyer and a very annoyed Shawn watching us nervously. "Your stuff is in here, now what do you want?" Shawn said, sounding rather dramatic. "I don't have anything to offer you."

I crossed my arms. "Who is she with?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

"Where would they have gone?"

"I don't know!"

"Can you find them?"

He threw his arms up in the air. "I already told you! I know nothing, I have nothing to offer. If it's all you came for, leave. If I knew how to find them, I would have done it already."

I glanced around. "How about Trina? Would she know?"

Shawn snickered. "The two of them are probably with some of her friends."

All my attention snapped to him. "The two of them? What do you mean?"

"I mean that Trina went with her. They're both gone."

I was surprised, but, at the same time, I wasn't. It made sense when I really thought about it. Trina knew people, Liz didn't. "Which friends do you think they could have gotten to agree?"

Shawn shrugged, his face serious. "I don't know, Kyle. I'm not risking hacking into Vitality's feed from their cameras just to see who it is."

I frown and run a hand through my hair. "If you had to take a wild guess, who would you say?"

He sighed exasperatedly, but at least he took the question seriously. "If I had to guess, I would say her hacker friends that do investigative stuff. They'd most likely be of the most use to her, but on the other hand, it could also be the hacker friends that drop off the grid constantly. One of them recently resurfaced, so he might be the one."

He? I shifted uncomfortably. "Have you been watching the coverage on the news?"

Shawn nodded. "I did. I saw it when I got home last night. I was out all day yesterday and I was a bit surprised when I got home to find no one was here. Normally, I wouldn't be, but Liza never left the house except when she was going to classes."

Fiona and I exchanged glances. Her never leaving the house wasn't normal. She rarely stayed home all day. "Did she plan everything?" I was dying to know.

Shawn's features became closed and his voice distant. "The police were already over here and asked me those things. Why would I tell you anything about that?" He glanced at the stairs. "I'll show you to the rooms you can stay in." He gestured for us to follow him.

With another shared glance, I grabbed both mine and Fiona's bags and carried them to the next floor. We followed Shawn into a yellow bedroom I recognized from video calls. "You can stay in this room," he told me. I sat my bag down. He went to another door and opened it, revealing a purple-schemed bedroom. "You can stay in here," he told Fiona.

I brought her bag to that room and sat it on the bed. "Is there a bus stop nearby?" Fiona asks Shawn.

He nods. "There's one up by the stop sign. Why?"

"I need to grab a couple of things at a store."

---

Almost from the moment Fiona left the house I could feel the awkwardness start. Shawn and I went downstairs and he turned on the news, which was somehow still covering the Vitality story more than anything else. But then, I suppose when you're a global corporation that you'll get more media coverage than anything else.

We weren't sitting there long when the news people said they had new information. Since they'd said that before and were only analyzing something they'd already said before, I didn't give it much thought. Not until I heard Shawn say excitedly, "I know him!"

I looked up and there was a sketch of the man I saw on the security video the night before when it first played on the news. Someone named Ade. "You know him?" I asked Shawn.

He nodded. "I don't know where he stays, so I don't really know where to go, but yeah."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "Wait - you know him but not where he lives?"

He shrugged. "He's Trina's friend, not mine. Look," he said, turning to me. "Would you be okay if I stepped out for, like, twenty minutes? I want to go run and see if I can find his car."

"Sure, I'll be fine."

"Great! I won't be gone for too long."

I almost never trusted my gut instincts, especially since they rarely turned out to be right, but it wouldn't leave me alone this time. Something wasn't sitting right with me, and I couldn't tell what it was. Being alone in a stranger's house wasn't helping, either.

So I did what anyone else would do: I gave myself a tour of his house.

I went up to the room I was in and began poking around. I knew Liz well enough to know she wouldn't have put anything in the drawers - she never saw a point in it when she'd just be going away again and would have to repack everything anyway - so I didn't bother with them. I went to the vanity and sat down. She'd left her camera and tripod sitting on it. I sighed and took the camera off.

The card was in it, so I started watching her videos. The first one was the take she posted. Like we always tried to do, she did it all in one so we wouldn't have to edit them later on. I smiled to myself as I went to the next one. It was the same thing, but she mentioned Shawn by name. If I hadn't known before, I knew now that he was Victoria Allen's son.

I went to the one before it and sucked in a breath when I heard my name.

"Hi Kyle." She smiled softly. "I had a feeling you'd come after me. You don't need to worry. I'm fine. I'm with friends." Her smile faded until it was gone and a tear began rolling down her cheek. I held the camera closer, hating that I couldn't wipe it away. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I know what I'm doing, and I know why, and I can only hope you understand. You're my best friend and I love you and Fiona so much. You both mean the world to me. I wish I could go back in time and make myself feel about you like you feel about me."

She reached up and wiped the tear away, along with a couple of others that had fallen. "I denied it to Fiona, but there was a time when I did have a crush on you. I don't know if you liked me at the time, but I wish I knew. We were fifteen then, and I felt so bad for feeling those things because we were friends and I loved what we had. I didn't want to ruin it. So I swallowed down all of those feelings until they were gone. Knowing what I do now, I wish I hadn't, but what's done is done. We can't go back and change anything."

I ignored the lone tear that was making its way to my neck and kept watching. "Kyle," she said, now looking both bashful and worried. "I know that, if you're watching this, either something's gone wrong and someone gave you my camera, or you came to Shawn's house. If it's the latter, don't trust him." Her eyes, which had been cast down, now looked up with an intensity. "Don't let him tell you it was all me or all Trina - he invited me down there, he asked me to help him. Which I didn't." She sighed. "Here's the full story."

---

I shook my head as I sat down the camera, trying to process everything. Shawn was set on some sort of revenge plot. Surprisingly, I found myself capable of believing that. He was yet to give me a reason to doubt anything Liza said. Not that I felt I could truly ever doubt her.

Still, she'd said to check his room. I felt awful for even contemplating it. In the end, I went down to the living room again, sitting in the same spot as before, to wait for Shawn to get back.

---

"You're kidding me," Fiona hissed that afternoon when I cornered her in her room.

I shook my head. "Liza says Shawn's wanting to sabotage Vitality."

She glanced nervously at the door. "What do we do now?"

I sighed and sat on the bed. "I guess the only thing we really can do is stay tonight and try to find a place to stay somewhere. Either that or go home."

Fiona sat next to me. "What do you think would be best?"

"I'm not really sure." We sat in silence, each of us wrapped up in our own thoughts. All I could think about was how important it was to me to find Liza and make sure she was okay. That's the one thing I came to Dallas for, and that's what I was determined to do. I had no doubt Shawn could find her, but now I couldn't trust him. Now I didn't want him to find her.

After a couple of minutes, I stood. "I think I'm going to go down and talk to him," I told Fiona.

She nodded. "I'm going to stay up here."

"Okay. I'll come back and let you know if I find out anything about Liz." With a final nod from her, I made my way down to the living room, where Shawn was intently watching the news. After an update about someone else involved in everything came about an hour or so ago he became glued to the TV.

He glanced at me as I sat next to him. "I know where they must have gone," he said. "But I know my sister, and she would have cleared out at the first sign of trouble. She's not one to take risks like that."

I nodded slowly, unsure how to approach the questions I wanted to ask him. After a moment of silence, I decided to just ask. "Did you have any idea that they were planning something?"

He turned to me, expression blank. "No, of course not." The mask slipped for half a second, hurt and anger crossing his features briefly before all emotion left again. He studied my face. "Trina rarely ever discusses anything with me. I don't usually discuss things with her, either. We are close, but we still keep a certain distance between us."

"Did you invite Liza here?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Both of us did."

"Why did you invite her here?"

He turned to me. "I don't get what you're playing at here. Are you suggesting I had some reason to ask her here that wasn't simply to give her a place to stay while she was in training?"

I turned to him and gave him what I hoped was a steely gaze. "Liza wouldn't turn against Vitality if someone didn't persuade her. Her entire life revolved around that company. She thought that it was amazing because of everything that place does for people. So tell me, did you persuade her to come here?"

Shawn's look changed from blank to closed-off. "I don't have a reason to tell you thing. You're in my house, sitting on my couch, and you are not going to interrogate me in my own home!" He stood and stormed out of the room. I heard his angry footsteps all the way to his room and then the door slam.

If I wasn't nervous about staying here before, I was now.

---

A loud creak woke me up the next morning. I had a brief moment of panic when I opened my eyes and didn't recognize the room right away. Right. I was in Dallas. I rubbed my eyes and the footsteps in the hallway went right past my door and then down the stairs.

I made myself get up and get dressed, after which I headed downstairs. Shawn was standing in the kitchen. He looked up as I walked in. "I'm going to head out," he said. "I'll be back in about thirty minutes." He grabbed a set of keys and went into the garage.

Now that I was pretty much alone, I got out my phone and began searching for hotels in the area, figuring that I would try to find a nice one for cheap. If that didn't work out, I was going to book a flight home.

I hadn't been sitting at the bar for more than a few minutes before I heard someone pull into the garage and then the door begin to close. I hurriedly closed what I was looking at and stood up. I was fully unprepared for who walked through that door.

If I hadn't known her for years, I don't think I would have recognized her. The clothes she was wearing wasn't anything like her normal ones, her hair was shorter and a different color, and she had to have been wearing colored contact lenses because I knew that the eyes staring at me in shock weren't really brown.

I had, somehow, found Liza.