I searched the beanbag again, hoping for more. At the very bottom, I found a small notebook. It was Emily’s—I recognized her handwriting on the cover.
I opened it.
Emily’s Notebook
The notebook was a journal, written in Emily’s own words. It was dated from the months before she disappeared, and it described a secret she’d been keeping from everyone.
“I can’t stay here,” she wrote. “I can’t keep pretending everything is fine. I need to find out who I am, and I can’t do that if I’m stuck in this life. I know it will hurt them. I know they’ll never understand. But I have to go.”
She mentioned a place—a city far away. She mentioned a “new identity” and “starting over.” She mentioned that she’d been planning her escape for months.
But what shocked me most was what she wrote about Ethan.
“I told Ethan everything. He’s the only one who knows. I made him promise not to tell anyone. He’s only fourteen, and I’m putting this on him, but I don’t have a choice. I need him to know that I’m okay, that I chose this, that it wasn’t an accident or a crime. I need someone in this family to know the truth.”
