Prologue: Sage Devlin
I don’t know how I got here.
Not here physically, but to this point in my life.
I moved out here to be left alone, to find solace, to find myself. Instead, I found myself involved in a disappearance case, or cases, but the most recent one is what ensnared me.
I had been a remote investigative reporter for a few years, doing digital tracking and trailing leads through the vast internet, making phone calls and taking Zoom meetings instead of e-mails when I had to. Before this, I was in an office, but things just became too much and I decided to go freelance. I moved as far away from a city as possible, got a dog to keep me company, and decided to pave my own way. I could still help, write, and pay my bills, but I didn’t have to physically interact with anyone and that’s what I wanted.
Or so I thought.
I had a neighbor that lived over a kilometer or so down the road, and she was a kind older lady, but other than that, it was just me, my dog Kacey, and the chickens. I had several acres of land, a small one room cottage, and nobody to bother me. I could work when I wanted, sleep when I wanted, do whatever I wanted without anyone to answer to, not even my therapist.
The problem was—now I was getting bored because for some reason as soon as I moved, I lost my knack for tracking down stories and had hit dud after dud as far as anything interesting.
I wanted to help. I wanted to solve something. It was part of the reason I left the newspaper I was working for because all the stories there were pure rubbish and not what I signed on for. It was almost—insulting. It wasn’t investigative journalism, it was nonsense.
But after moving, I was finding it hard to come across anything that wasn’t already being covered so I did what you probably shouldn’t do and I took to the forums and threads of the darker parts of the internet to see what was being talked about. Maybe I could piece some things together and discover a new story, or a lead to a cold one, or something—anything.
I never expected to come across what I did, nor that I would be connected to it somehow.
