He’d carefully scrutinized Nico’s online presence and the multitude of social media platforms he and the list of Nico’s friends the Sanchezes had given to him used. This involved painstakingly dissecting every picture Nico had posted of himself or had been tagged in over the past year. (This served the dual purpose of unearthing any companions Nico’s parents didn’t know about, and scoping out the young man’s usual haunts.)

By the time Micah had clocked out, he knew that Nico’s favorite coffee shop was a hole-in-the-wall café near Queen’s College named The Tea, that he frequented drag queen bars with his friends on the weekends, and that in nearly every picture, he smiled with his entire face – crinkles near the corner of his eyes and a big, silly grin with shiny, white teeth on display.

In addition to probing his social media, most of Nico’s friends had returned Micah’s calls, and he’d been able to get a plethora of interviews lined up over the next few days. He’d also made roughly a dozen calls in order to secure permission from Queen’s College to search Nico’s dorm room.

Micah may or may not have been running himself ragged in order to avoid thinking about the train wreck that was his personal life. (But even if he was, was it really such a bad thing that Nico got the benefit of his fevered attention?)

Micah had been dead tired by the time he’d gotten home, and the theory that if he worked himself to the point of exhaustion, he wouldn’t have time to obsess over the clusterfuck of a situation he’d gotten himself into with Damon seemed to prove true.

He’d only experienced a small pang of discomfort when he’d spotted the gleaming, new iPhone 14 sitting innocently on his kitchen counter, the hysteria he’d feel otherwise buried beneath all the fatigue. Pointedly avoiding checking the phone for messages, Micah had merely shut the device off and turned it face down on the counter, determined to deal with the problem it represented another day, before collapsing into his bed and allowing sleep to take him.

Which brought Micah to today – Tuesday.

It was nearing noon, and he’d interviewed three of Nico’s friends, including the ex, and not one of them claimed to know where he could have gone – or even why he would have left. They all showed the appropriate amount of concern for Nico, not one of them triggering his bullshit detector.

Two of them had been Nico’s study partners, pursuing the same degree in computer science. They’d been adamant that Nico was doing well at school. He wasn’t falling behind on his work, like someone overwhelmed by college might have been. It all but killed the working theory that Nico might have taken off because of the pressure of upcoming finals.

It was concerning to them – and to Micah – that he had missed classes yesterday, and now today. Adding to the frustration (and worry) was the fact that there had been no new updates from Nico’s social media – which Micah was carefully monitoring. Not once in the past year had Nico gone more than a handful of days without updating his Instagram – until now.