EmberM564
Wilhelmina Burton disappears without warning.
At seventeen, she leaves behind a suffocating home, a mother who no longer knows how to reach her, and a past tangled with grief, addiction, and being unwanted. With no plan beyond survival, Wil drifts through unfamiliar cities, scraping together nights in cheap motels and bus stations, learning quickly that freedom is colder and lonelier than she imagined. Every closed door, every rejection, strips her down to something raw and stubborn-someone determined to start over, even if it means becoming unrecognizable.
But running doesn't mean vanishing.
Fletcher, a private investigator who specializes in missing persons, has been hired to find Wilhelmina Burton. Calm, observant, and patient, he moves through the same spaces she does-diners, bus stations, nameless streets-always just a step behind. He doesn't chase. He waits. And the closer he gets, the more the lines between rescue and capture begin to blur.
As Wil fights to build a new life from nothing, she must confront an unsettling truth: escape is never clean, and the past has a way of breathing down your neck when you least expect it. This is a story about disappearance and pursuit, about identity and reinvention, and about what happens when the person you're running from finally starts to understand why you ran in the first place.