The Signal We Never Shared

Synopsis

During dinner, Nathan suddenly put down his fork and looked at me. "Who's Marcus Knight?" My heart skipped a beat. Marcus Knight. That name was something my best friend Lily and I had made up one drunken night. We'd agreed that if either of us ever got into trouble and couldn't be reached, we'd use Marcus Knight as our distress signal. Besides the two of us, no one else in the world knew this name existed. And Lily had been missing for exactly one month. She'd said she was going to Thailand for vacation. And then she never came back. I looked at Nathan's casual expression, my heart sinking bit by bit. How did he know this name? The name Marcus Knight was something Lily and I had invented during our college graduation year, after finishing an entire bottle of wine while lying on the rooftop. The moon was full that night. Lily wrapped her arm around my neck, drunk, and said, "Claire, let's create a code word." "What kind of code word?" "Like if one day something happens to one of us and we can't be reached, the other person will know something's wrong when they