It has been a year since Annalise Montgomery lost her fifteen year old sister Lilly in the middle of a sunny day when she was waiting in a parking lot.
Annalise takes the case into her control when the police are empty handed. No leads, no traces, n...
A D O R I N G A N N A L I S E Chapter Thirty Three
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I feel like a stranger in my own body.
Something is brewing within me that I can't place. This is something I hadn't thought to do before, and now it's eating me alive for being so stupid.
"What exactly am I suppose to do?" Reggie Cohen leans against his own car, sweat making his forehead shiny. He's already complained about the heat so many times already.
"Once I'm around the corner and you can't see me, press start on the timer. Once I'm back in sight, stop it." I could be doing this on my own, but I might as well use him if he's here.
He opens the stopwatch on his phone. "Are you going to tell me why we're doing this?"
"I will once I'm back down." I walk to the entry doors to my apartment building, pressing in my code and going inside.
Each step I take is the same pace as I remember. I could never forget any details from that day. From the day Lilly Montgomery had gone missing.
I ensure that everything is perfect. Every step is timed the same, and that I wait long enough to match the time I'd placed the boxes down in my apartment.
Then, I walk back down and outside to Reggie. "How long?" I ask and try stealing a peak at his phone.
"Three minutes and fifteen seconds." That's all it took for everything to fall apart. Such little time. "Are you going to tell me what we're doing? Especially in this heat?"
I take my phone out of my pocket and bring up my own timer and setting three minutes and fifteen seconds.
I press start and start walking through the parking lot where I last saw Lilly at my car. "The only way out of there is this driveway." I explain since he'd followed me. I keep walking at a steady pace, and when I reach the end, I turn left. "I need to know how far my sister got in three minutes. This is a main road, surely someone-"
The timer rings. I stop, barely making it three buildings from the end of the driveway. There was no way that she could have been grabbed from here. There would be too many witnesses.
"Someone should have seen her. I would've seen a car drive away when I checked out here." I watch vehicles drive past, there is at least always one on the road.
My shoulders slump as the storm in my chest stirs. "Maybe not. It's hard to tell without any cameras in the area."
More damned dead ends. To me, the only red flag is my own apartment complex. I never finished knocking on everyone's doors.
