First Brotilla of the season,he’d captioned the photo, which showed him and a half dozen other friends, shirtless and sweating and swilling beers in kayaks. And there, in the middle of the chaos, was Townsend, looking not at the camera but instead at the dark-haired woman sitting in front of him in his boat. The same woman Kaitlyn had seen sitting in the passenger seat of Townsend’s stupid little roadster a few weeks earlier, the first time she’d staked out his place.
She touched her finger to the screen. Sure enough, the woman in the photo was tagged: @taliadanvers. And though her profile was sparse—she hadn’t posted a photo since 2017, and even that was a heavily filtered selfie—Kaitlyn at least had a name.
When she laid out all the steps she’d taken to find Townsend—and now his girlfriend—Kaitlyn knew it sounded a little unhinged. But she also knew that this kind of low-grade cyberstalking was a regular Tuesday afternoon for most Gen Zers. Her sister could be given a zodiac sign and a school mascot and turn up the entire life history of a friend’s Cuff date in seconds. It wasn’t so strange to have this skill. In fact, you could argue that it was dangerousnotto do your research. You could end up with a weirdo, or a deviant, or a full-fledged psycho. You could end up dead.
Disappointingly, an extensive internet search turned up nothing about Talia’s early life. It was as though she didn’t exist—or, at least, didn’t do anything worthy of leaving a digital footprint—before her time in college, when a Natalia Danvers started earning a spot on the dean’s list every year at Auburn University. It surprised Kaitlyn to learn that Townsend’s girlfriend attended a state school rather than an Ivy League university like him and seemingly all his friends. And even though Talia was a member of Zeta Tau Alpha (according to an article Kaitlyn found about a charity car wash), she didn’t quite fit the mold of a sorority girl to Kaitlyn either. She wasn’t blond, for one. And from what Kaitlyn could gather, Talia just seemed ...different.
In her search, Kaitlyn found anInner Clickinterview with Talia published three years earlier, not long after she was hired as a machine learning engineer at the dating app Cuff—and apparently sometimeafter she decided to start going by Talia rather than Natalia. Done as part of a Women in STEM series, the interviewer had asked Talia all about the challenges of working in a male-dominated field.
“I really hope that we can get to a point where we don’t need communities just for women,” Talia said at one point. “I want a future where women feel confident in communities for all people, where they can ask questions without hesitation and advocate for their own opportunities.”
Dammit,Kaitlyn had thought. She’d been so prepared to dislike Talia—the woman who’d replaced her sister and tied herself to a man as dangerously arrogant as Townsend Fuller—but the more she read, the more she found herself charmed by this mysterious person. In another life, Talia was exactly the kind of person Kaitlyn would want as a friend: someone ambitious and articulate and put together. Someone so unlike the mess that Amanda is.
Orwas. It still isn’t clear if Kaitlyn should be thinking about her sister in the past tense. With each passing day, it feels less likely that Amanda will simply turn up in a whirlwind of tangled hair extensions and empty apologies. But still, Kaitlyn holds out hope. Because when she doesn’t—when she acknowledges the possibility that her sister will never come back—it becomes difficult to catch her breath, her throat constricting like she’s having an allergic reaction.
Before the accident that left her orphaned, Kaitlyn had friends. She got drinks with coworkers. She went on dates. Losing her parents as suddenly and dramatically as she did changed that—making relationships of any kind felt like a trap. According to her therapy chatbot on ShrinkGPT, grief can rewire the brain, effectively locking the mind in a permanent stress response. Kaitlyn liked this idea, that her amygdala and hippocampus and cortisol levels were responsible for her reluctance to socialize rather than some innate weirdness inside her. Would she have ever considered herself popular? Absolutely not (and Amanda, who was popular, often reminded her of this fact growing up). But she hadn’t always felt this deeply alone, too afraid to even contact a human therapist for fear that they, too, would leave her. Amanda was the onlyperson she had. Amanda was the only person who could even remotely understand what she’d been through.
Sitting now in her sister’s car, outside her sister’s ex-boyfriend’s building, Kaitlyn knows she should leave. Now that Talia has arrived, it’s unlikely that either she or Townsend will emerge again until morning. The idea of returning to her eerily quiet apartment, however, fills her with dread. No, she can’t be alone, not right now. Instead, she puts the car into drive and heads to the shooting range.
The Range at Austin is about a twenty-minute drive from Downtown Austin, but over the past few weeks, it’s become one of the only places where Kaitlyn feels like she can breathe. As a kid, she never understood her dad’s love of the firing range, and she was never interested when he tried to give her lessons on properly handling firearms.
“A woman should know how to do three things,” he told her once. “She should be able to change a tire, balance a checkbook, and handle a gun.”
She laughed him off when he told her this. “I don’t think anyone uses a checkbook anymore, Dad.”
But he remained firm: “You’re not like your sister, Kate. You’ll never be happy with someone taking care of you.”
Was this true? Kaitlyn was pretty sure that—if she had as many suitors as Amanda—she’d welcome a helping hand.
“I have no doubt that you’d be able to tackle anything on your own,” he continued. “But it’s a scary place out there, especially for a woman. I want to be sure you can support and protect yourself.”
“I can,” Kaitlyn promised him—though at the time, she never imagined that she’d be orphaned at twenty-four. She never imagined that her parents would just be gone one day, leaving her with only a fraction of their estate and the responsibility of looking after her eternally irresponsible younger sister.
It wasn’t until the first time she visited the Range at Austin—not long after her parents passed—and felt the cold, unyielding pressure of a SIG Sauer P320 in her hand that it all finally made sense. Powerfuldidn’t quite describe the way she felt. What she felt instead was a sense of release, like she’d overcome a long-held fear and could no longer remember why she’d been afraid in the first place.
Soon enough, she’s standing on the firing line, pistol in hand, waiting for the cue from the range safety officer to commence firing. Downrange, she eyes the target: a faceless, genderless human silhouette that she initially thought of as a general threat but, over her past few visits, has begun thinking of as Townsend. When the range is declared hot, she aims and squeezes the trigger of her weapon. The first bullet clips the target’s shoulder. The second hits close to his heart. She is still learning; she will improve. When Kaitlyn sets her mind to something, anything is possible.
Later—after making the trek back to her apartment and heating up a can of Chef Boyardee beef ravioli in the microwave—Kaitlyn checks her Reddit thread asking for information on Townsend. There isn’t much new activity; after an initial spate of comments, it seems the internet sleuths have already moved on from Amanda’s disappearance to a new case. The two new comments aren’t of any use either; just one user writingSo sadand another sayingHe looks like the kind of guy who’d call you “mommy” in bed.
Kaitlyn logs out of her burner account and back into her personal Reddit account. Then she posts a new comment as herself. It’s time to stop hiding, she decides.
This is Kaitlyn, Amanda’s sister,she types.I’m the OP of that message about Amanda’s IG Story. I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to respond and offer any information you may have. Ever since losing our parents, Amanda and I have only had each other, and not knowing if she’s okay has been unbearable. If you know anything about what happened to my sister,Pleasereach out. It would mean the world to me.
After reading the message twice, Kaitlyn takes a deep breath and posts the comment. A little maudlin, perhaps, but why not tug at people’s heartstrings? She doesn’t have much left to lose.
She doesn’t expect a response right away, but still, it would have been nice. She keeps her phone by her side with the volume turned up as she eats her ravioli, watchesThe Real Housewives of Atlanta, brushes her teeth, changes into an oversize Southwestern University T-shirt, and climbs into bed—and even though she refreshes the page every few minutes, no response appears. The only message she receives all night is from that chatty data science professor (who’s been asking for a second date since May), and Kaitlyn is not in any sort of mood to arrange a date right now.
It’s only as she’s starting to fall asleep, imagining she’s back on the range with her pistol in hand, when her phone beeps. She gropes for it in the dark, sensing it’s a message that can’t wait.
At first, she’s disappointed. It appears she’s merely been notified that someone upvoted her comment. But then she notices the username attached to the upvote: geminibaby530. It’s Amanda’s go-to password. The same one that had allowed Kaitlyn to hack her sister’s Instagram. And while it could be a coincidence, something in the way her pulse races tells her that it’s not.
Kaitlyn navigates to the profile associated with the username only to find no other activity. Could this be Amanda? Could this be her way of letting Kaitlyn know that she’s okay? Her heart hammers in her chest as she simply thinks about the possibility. It doesn’t explain where her sister has been—but the idea that she’s somewhere and that she’s safe makes Kaitlyn tingle all over with hope.
Of course, if this userisAmanda, that means Kaitlyn’s second-worst fear could be true: that nothing nefarious happened to her sister at all. That her sister is just the unreliable, uncaring, unhinged mess Kaitlyn always thought she was.
Still on geminibaby530’s profile, Kaitlyn clicks the chat icon in the upper right-hand corner. But all she receives is an error message—the user has already deleted their account.
Chapter Fourteen
