Chapter 1: The Empty Chair
The rain had not stopped since noon, but it was not the real reason behind the empty chairs inside Milford Public Library.
Fifteen chairs had been arranged in front of a small table covered with blue-covered books, each carrying an elegant title:
The Last Page — Chloe Bennett.
The book signing was supposed to begin at six o’clock. It was now ten minutes past seven, and the middle chair — Chloe’s chair — remained empty.
“Maybe she was delayed because of the rain,” a woman in her forties said, holding a pre-signed copy as if it were a rare treasure.
Daniel Reese stood near the glass entrance, staring at the empty street outside. His phone was in his hand, his finger pressing the call button for the seventh time.
No answer.
While he waited, a school security guard passed by on his way home, offering Daniel a quick greeting before disappearing into the rainy street. Nobody paid much attention to him.
“Chloe would never be late for her first signing,” Daniel whispered, more to himself than to anyone else.
He had known her for two years, ever since she had sent him a handwritten manuscript inside a plain brown envelope.
No return address.
No explanation.
Only a name:
Chloe Bennett, seventeen years old.
He had read the first page, then stayed awake until dawn finishing the rest.
The novel was about a murder in a small town — a town that looked very much like Milford.
Perhaps a little too much.
Two streets away, Detective Emma Carter sat inside her car outside the police station, still wearing her work uniform despite having finished her shift two hours earlier.
She had not planned on attending a book signing for a teenage girl she barely knew.
But half an hour earlier, one of her colleagues had sent her a message:
"I found something strange in the girl's book. Come see this page."
Attached was a scanned image.
Emma opened it and read the paragraph:
«"They found her at three in the morning, beside the lighthouse rock. Her blue dress was still wet from the night before. There was no blood. There were no footprints except her own. Only a small folded note inside her pocket: 'I'm sorry for what I did to him.'"»
Emma stopped at the final sentence.
She read it again.
Something about it bothered her, but she could not identify what.
Maybe it was just a coincidence.
Maybe it was nothing.
She turned off the engine and stepped out into the rain.
She arrived at the library at half past seven.
Daniel was speaking nervously with a woman in her sixties wearing a gray wool coat — Margaret Hill, Chloe’s former teacher, as Emma would later discover.
“Did you contact her father?” Margaret asked.
Her voice was calm, but her hands trembled slightly as she held her bag.
“Three times. He didn’t answer either,” Daniel replied.
Emma approached and showed her badge.
“Detective Carter. Did anyone else arrive late with her?”
Daniel looked at her, worry clear on his face.
“She usually walks alone. The library is close to her house. Ten minutes away.”
“Ten minutes,” Emma repeated quietly, looking through the glass doors at the dark street.
Near the entrance stood a man in his forties wearing a dark coat.
Jake Moran.
A private security guard. A former police officer.
He raised his hand briefly in greeting, then bent down to help an elderly woman struggling with a broken umbrella before she entered her car.
“Bad night for walking,” he said to Emma as he passed. “I hope the girl is alright.”
Then he left, heading toward the same alley Chloe took every evening.
The same direction where his house was located.
Emma watched him disappear.
But the question that stayed in her mind was not about Jake.
It was about the sentence from the scanned page:
"Why does this feel so familiar?"
From Chloe Bennett’s manuscript, the page before Chapter One:
"If I ever disappear, do not look for me first. Look for the person who wanted to write my ending."
