“I could lie to you and tell you that this all sounds on the up-and-up,” I said. “But what kind of friend does that? I’m not saying your relationship with Jared isn’t real. But if I don’t have the courage to tell you how it looks, who will?”

That stopped her. Ema kept her face down. “So you think, what, it’s a prank?”

“Maybe,” I said. “That’s all. Maybe it’s just a joke.”

She looked up at me. “A joke?”

“A cruel one, but yeah, maybe.”

“Well, ha-ha.” Ema shook her head. “Mickey, think about it. Let’s say it was a prank. Let’s say it was the mean kids in school. Like Troy or Buck, right? Let’s say they set this whole thing up.”

I waited.

Ema spread her arms. “Where’s the payoff?”

I had no answer to that.

“They would have let me know, right? They would have mocked me. They would have rubbed it in my face or put the intimate conversations online. They’d let the world know what a fool I was, wouldn’t they?”

A tear slid down her cheek.

“Why would Jared the prankster just vanish without having the last word?”

I swallowed. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Mickey?”

“What?”

“It is easy to make fun of these relationships. I used to do it too. But think about it. When it is just in writing like this, when it is just texts or e-mails, just your words and nothing else, it is actually more real. It doesn’t matter what you look like or what table you sit at during lunch. It doesn’t matter if you play quarterback or head up the chess club. All of that becomes irrelevant. It is just the two of you and your intelligence and your feelings. Do you see?”

“I guess,” I admitted.

“Listen to me, Mickey. Look at my eyes and really listen.”

I did. I looked into those eyes, and for a moment, I felt happily lost. I trusted those eyes. I believed in them.

“I know,” Ema said. “Don’t ask me how. But I know. We have to do this—even if you think I’m crazy.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not up to us,” Ema said.

“Huh? Of course it is.”

Ema shook her head. “These things come to us, Mickey. It’s bigger than we are.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“What, you think this is Abeona?”

She moved closer to me so we could share the laptop. I smelled her perfume. It was something new, something different. I had smelled it before, but couldn’t place it. She pulled up Jared’s page again. “There has only been one new photograph added since Jared disappeared . . .”

When I saw the screen, I nearly gasped out loud.

There, on Jared Lowell’s page, was a photograph of a butterfly.

Again, to be more specific, the Tisiphone Abeona.