The Search for Lily Myers ✓

45 | Burn

Amelia didn't know yet how to navigate through this strange new world of theirs.

It was as though her entire life up to this point could be divided into four periods, the first being before she met Colton. Then she was with him, and her life was suddenly much different than it had ever been before. She'd spent her time smiling in public and crying behind closed doors, and once spring had bloomed into summer, he'd formed this secret obsession with Lily Myers. Leaving him was possibly the most defining moment of Amelia's life to date, and with it came the era of her and Henry—falling in love right after both of their perceptions of the world had completely shattered apart, trying to relearn what was true and what was only in their heads. Naturally, right when they'd grown into this new way of existence and somewhat settled there was when the meteor hit, and now the world was once again a different place than the one they knew.

There was, of course, a much-warranted degree of celebration. Both Lily's parents and Henry's arrived at the hospital while Amelia was giving her witness report and Jen had found her in the waiting room afterward, still wilted on Nat's shoulder. But there had been tears—happy, relieved tears—shining in his mother's eyes when she rushed over to bundle Amelia up in a hug. She had scrunched her eyes shut and let Jen gently stroke her hair, knowing that there were so many things she was going to have to explain to her own mother if she wished to receive that kind of comfort from her.

She spent the next few weeks as somewhat of a recluse in her own apartment, doing her work from home both because she was liable to burst into tears at even the slightest provocation and because detectives kept knocking at her door unannounced to talk to her.

The reckoning with her parents had been forced to come quickly. Less than forty-eight hours after they'd found Lily, it was plastered all over the morning news that there was a manhunt for an officer Colton Maine, who had conveniently gone off the grid and not shown up to his job on Monday morning. Amelia had watched from her couch as a picture of him in his uniform popped up onscreen—a picture that she herself had taken months ago and then passed off to the detectives just one day prior to help them identify who they were looking for.

Her lungs suddenly felt very, very tight. It wasn't like she herself was in the photograph, but that hardly mattered now that his name and face had been put out there. Everyone who knew her at all, who had looked at just a singular one of her social media posts while she'd been with him, was about to realize that the man she'd been romantically linked with was now a fugitive.

And everyone who'd ever known Lily Myers, who knew that she had come home under mysterious circumstances on the same day that this officer was accused of taking a woman hostage, was going to be able to put those pieces together, too.

It took all of two minutes for Amelia's phone to be barraged with texts and phone calls.

A week had passed and she'd barely spoken to Henry at all.

It had nothing to do with him not wanting to talk to her, but there were only so many hours in a day and he was being tugged in so many directions at once. Between checking in on Lily at least once every day—after she was discharged from the hospital, it'd been decided that she should stay at her parents' house for the time being—showing up to his job, cramming for the final exams in his classes that he'd barely been able to focus on all semester, and being pestered by the detectives just as much as the rest of them were, he could barely even fit in a few hours of sleep each night. He was sending her incremental texts to keep her up to speed about how Lily was doing, but Amelia went days without actually getting to hear his voice.