Free Unknown (Unknown Series Book 1) by Wendy Higgins

shit or is it just me?” Julian had been an EMT for a couple years longer than me.
    He shrugged and chuckled. “I’ve seen weirder. People do fucked up things, or see fucked up things, and then their brain deals with it in fucked up ways.”
    I let out a deep breath and tried to relax. I pulled out my work laptop and began to type up the incident report. I included every detail, including what the woman had claimed. I usually didn’t check back on reports after I filed them, too worried that what I’d find out would be bad news, but I’d definitely be looking into this one tomorrow.
    My phone dinged with a text and I looked down to see a message from Ken. It had been nearly a month since he’d contacted me.
    Not to be a stalker, but I saw ur schedule and ur off Sat. Dinner? U have to eat, Tate. May as well eat with me.
    Julian asked, “Who’s that? Your friend Remy? Let me know next time you and her go out. I might just happen to show up.”
    He winked at me from the driver’s seat and I shook my head, smiling. Last time we’d gone out had been at a fire fighter’s house party. No cop friends were there, so everyone turned a blind eye to Remy’s underage drinking—and in all fairness, she looked at least twenty-one. Remy met Julian shot-for-shot. She nearly drank him under the table, but I had to carry her out and babysit her all night. I didn’t care for a rematch. I shoved my phone back into my pocket without responding. I’d let him think the text was from Remy. Julian didn’t know about Ken’s persevering attempts for a date, and I wanted to keep it that way.
     
    I was still weirded out when I got home that evening. Until I saw the letter waiting for me on the table with Rylen’s messy script. My heart leapt, then sank, then leapt again as I opened it with shaking fingers.
    His letter began: Dear Pepper, Haha, very funny. You’d better be setting your sights higher than that . . .
    And he proceeded to talk about the massive tropical birds he’d seen, one of which sat on his shoulder at an outdoor bar and didn’t want to leave him. There wasn’t another single mention of my bold admission. He’d written it off as a joke.
    “What’s wrong, Amber?” Mom asked. She was looking at the letter, which I’d crumbled in my sweating fist.
    “Nothing.” I forced a smile and went to take a long shower. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough water or soap in the world to wash away the strangeness and disappointment of the day. I texted Remy right away and spent the next hour scrolling through her tirade of male-bashing texts as they came in. Hearing her call Rylen a bone-headed, cave-dwelling, award-winning-idiot-of-the-century didn’t make me feel any better. Because deep in my heart I knew I would never have the nerve to tell him again. Because maybe he wasn’t dismissing it as a joke. Maybe he was gently telling me he wasn’t interested in me like that. The spark of hope I’d been holding onto for so long had dimmed.
    I was tired of feeling this way. Tired of the roller coaster of hoping and then having those hopes crushed. I couldn’t keep living like this.
    As I sat on my bed, filled with a sense of loss, I pulled out my phone and read Ken’s text several times through.
    Okay , I texted back, let’s have dinner.
    The next morning when I arrived at the hospital, the first thing I did was to open my laptop and search for Grace Fondent’s file to see if any information had been added. Nothing came up. I double checked the spelling of her name. I typed in Gracie instead. Still nothing. Baffled, I went to my supervisor’s office.
    She held up a finger as she finished her phone conversation, then hung up and smiled at me. “What can I do for you, Amber?” Her phone rang again, but she ignored it.
    “I can’t find one of the files from our run yesterday. Grace Fondent?”
    “Ah,” she said. “The FBI are taking over that case, so we passed the file along to them.”
    The FBI? Why? Utterly