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I swore under my breath, standing and swiping at my chair, sending it clattering to the ground. She hadn’t picked that case because she wanted to test me. It was her fucking hometown.

“Lex,” Oliver chastised, but I ignored him.

“What’s her last name?” I asked, continuing to pace as the pieces fell into place.

“Parker,” Fai answered, but gave a different answer than Monroe, who spoke at the same time:

“Taylor.”

The trio still at the table stared at Monroe in surprise.

“Taylor?” Jackie asked.

I heard them talking as I wandered into Goldie’s office, which had been left mostly untouched in the last few months. I rifled through her desk, looking for the folder—one of the last ones we had dived into together.

“Yeah… did you say Parker?” I heard Monroe ask, “That’s our mother’s first name.”

“Why would she lie?” Oliver asked.

Monroe sighed. “Probably to hide from me. I was fighting hard for custody, trying to assuage my own guilt. Her running and going by a different name would hide her from me.”

I found the folder in question and walked out of Goldie’s office to the conference table. I slapped it down on the table, throwing it open and rifling through the photos. Oliver looked at me, perplexed. “Lex, what are you doing?”

I continued to ignore him, but didn't blame him for his worry. I must have looked like I had lost my mind, tossing photos to the ground and onto the table in my search. Finally, I found it: the one photo I hadn't looked at deeply enough. The oldest in the stack. I held it up to the camera.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” I asked, my voice tight.

Monroe smiled softly at the photo. “Little Marigold Taylor,” he spoke to himself.

“Fuck,” I muttered, running my hands through my hair in frustration. Jackie gasped at the admission, and Fai looked shell-shocked. The only one of us with any composure was Oliver.

“Marigold… her name is Marigold?” he asked.

Monroe nodded and looked confused. “You didn’t know? Do you know anything about her?”

My gaze whipped to the screen. “More than you know, considering we’ve been around when you haven’t. We know her as Goldie, because that’s how she introduced herself.”

“That’s how she signed her paperwork,” Fai added. “All of her legal docs are under that name. We did know her. We knew everything important and everything she was willing to share. So why wouldn’t she tell us her name?”

“I mean, the first few years, if she was trying to stay under the radar, sure,” Oliver mused. “But why not when it kept coming up in the case?” He turned to me. “Was she ever cagey about it?”

I shook my head. “She gave me the green light to try and track this Marigold down. She must have known I could never find out the truth.”

“That note… it was about her. Someone was telling her to run, weren’t they?” Fai asked, stretching out his hand, and I knew he wanted my stolen piece of evidence. I fished it from my pocket and slid it across the table to him.

He flipped through the pages, finding her writing on that last page. He read it aloud. “Tell Marigold to run, and to run far. Tell her to go where the witches were burned.”

Monroe looked at us in utter confusion, his brow furrowed and mouth slightly agape as we all spoke. I couldn’t blame the man; we had thrown him into the deep end of this conversation with little to no explanation. All he knew was his little sister, whom he hadn’t seen in two decades, was missing. “Can one of you tell me what the hell is going on here?”

“You know what we do here?” Oliver asked, and Monroe nodded.

“An investigative journal, right?” he asked.

I nodded. “We were working on a case right before she went missing. In Cherrytree Hills. Someone has been breaking into homes, murdering the parents, and abducting a child… every year. For twenty years.”

Monroe’s eyes were wide in shock. “My parents weren’t the only ones?”

I shook my head. “Not by a long shot. Sixty total victims now.”