Chapter 3

#FindAnnaLeigh was trending when I arrived in the office two days later.

The nonprofit was located in a decrepit multipurpose building that was supposed to indicate that we were "part of the community," according to my boss, but was rapidly emptying due to the building's decay. The weather was uncharacteristically cold for the beginning of November, and the first snowflakes of the year peppered my hair as I made the walk from my car. Ordinarily, the first snow made me happy, but I struggled to find coziness within the chill that morning.

"You look tired," Carole said.

Carole had been sitting next to me since I started the job. At the time, I assumed she was close to retirement and had since learned she was a mere fifty-three years old and would be working for the corporation for what felt like another hundred years. Carole liked to hold her age over me because it was the only thing she had. Like me, she had no power, no money. The only privileges she was given were snide little comments like "You'll change your mind about that in ten years" and derisive snorts whenever I tried to pitch new ideas in meetings.

"I'm fine," I told her.

I wasn't fine. Since the punk show, I'd looked at every picture Max had ever posted on social media. I tried to stalk Rebecca/Rachel, whose actual name turned out to be Reese, but all her accounts were on private, which felt like a personal attack. I cycled through pep talks, telling myself that I was too good for him, that I didn't even really like him to begin with, that this was an opportunity to find someone better, before reassuring myself that surely he and Reese were just friends and he would text at any moment. Any moment! I decided to start a new exercise program and spent an hour looking at indoor bikes that I couldn't afford and had no room for before closing the browser tabs. I devoted myself to clean eating, only to order greasy Chinese food for dinner that I'd eaten for every meal since. It wasn't even about Max, not wholly, but rather resentment that I was seemingly unable to have a casual relationship, my heart like a hook that latched onto whatever was nearest.

I settled in with my first cup of coffee in front of my computer. Coffee made work more tolerable and I carefully parsed out each beverage as tiny treats that carried me through the day. Too much and my hands became jittery and ineffectual, and too little and I slumped over my desk by noon, deprived of energy like a marathon runner who didn't take in enough carbs.

Technically we weren't supposed to look at social media at work. Technically we weren't supposed to do a lot of things. We weren't supposed to park too close to the building to save those spaces for visitors. We weren't supposed to online shop or eat lunch at our desks. We weren't supposed to use our cell phones or wear athleisure in the office, even the stuff that was designed to look corporate. It was hard to care about technicalities. If Carole could wear her flowy hippy skirts and ugly crochet scarves at her desk, I could wear yoga pants and look at Twitter.

Anna Leigh appeared before me, her face on the screen and her name in the trending topics. On the surface, there were few commonalities between us. She was almost a decade younger than me, married, and a recent law school graduate. She was conventionally beautiful in a way that I could only ever aspire to be, with big blue eyes, blond hair, and a tiny frame. When I met women like Anna Leigh in real life I resented them for their good looks and success. As someone who was missing, she became the everywoman—me, or Meghan, or any other woman who dared to exist in the world—and I felt the pain of her absence acutely.

I shared the post.

"If you know anything at all please come forward," I wrote. "She was last seen in the Atlanta area, but it's possible that she's crossed state lines."

I spent the morning falling into a hole of Anna Leigh. I studied her Instagram, her dormant Twitter, her LinkedIn account. I MacGyvered my way around paywalls in order to read articles about her disappearance. By lunchtime, I was intimately familiar with her life in a way that I didn't even know my own friends.

Anna Leigh was last spotted at the law firm in Georgia where she served as an intern. I assumed, though never confirmed, that the firm was the kind of place with free snacks in the break room and not the kind of place where a person expected to be kidnapped and murdered. Later, we would learn that it was that same firm where William Thompson worked, but William Thompson wasn't yet a name that we knew.

Anna Leigh, in the tradition of female members of her family, got married a month after graduating from college and started law school two months after that. It was expected that she would have a successful career until she had children and then she was to stay home and take care of her family while her husband supported them financially. The difficulty was that Anna Leigh's husband, Tripp, was a poor student in law school and had to settle for lower quality internships until he had the credentials to start at his father's firm, which specialized in personal injury law and was frequently accused of "ambulance chasing."

People described Anna Leigh as disarming. Men often made the mistake of thinking that she was cute and harmless, and she knew how to take advantage of that impulse. Anna Leigh, despite her family's wishes for her, was determined to become a judge. These large aspirations were made acceptable by her disappearance.

"Anna Leigh has a bright future," her parents said on the news. "We need to bring her home."

They spoke in a Georgia drawl that was foreign to my Midwestern cadence. Anna Leigh's mother wore chunky jewelry and too much makeup, which was ineffectual at covering the large bags under her eyes that had formed from crying. Her father looked like a man who processed his emotions through shooting deer in a forest and didn't know what to do with himself now that he was the deer begging for the return of his child.

"We know she's still alive," he said. "We just know it."

They might have discovered that she was missing sooner if Tripp hadn't come home late from a night out with the boys. Most of his college friends were still single and lived in the area and they hadn't fully let go of the notions of their youth. Tripp was drunk when he arrived at home the night that Anna Leigh went missing. He was so drunk that he stripped off his clothes in the living room and fell asleep on the couch in his boxers. When he woke in the morning, he yelled "Fuck" because he was late for work. He assumed that Anna Leigh had already left. She was never late for work.

It wasn't until he got home that evening that Tripp realized that something was amiss. Anna Leigh was in charge of dinner in their house. If she didn't have time to cook, she told Tripp to pick something up or they went out to eat. This was so ingrained in their routine that Tripp didn't notice that it was happening. Dinner, it seemed, manifested itself in the same way that mail appeared in their mailbox each day. There was someone who made these things happen, but the process was invisible to him and that was how he liked it.

His stomach grumbled. Where was Anna Leigh? He hoped that she was amenable to takeout. He wanted chicken fingers dipped in honey mustard. No matter how old he got, he could never get away from those childhood cravings.

He sent her a text.

Where r u?

He sent her another when she didn't respond.

I'm starting to get worried, he wrote.

Tripp called Anna Leigh's best friend. The two of them had hooked up during a drunken night in college, something that Anna Leigh didn't know and would never find out. Since then, he'd kept a careful distance from her.

"Have you seen Anna Leigh?" he asked.

"No, but when you see her can you tell her to respond to my texts? It's important," the best friend replied. She later regretted her flippancy. She was mad at a dead girl and didn't even know it.

"That's just it," Tripp said. "She's not here."

She convinced Tripp to call the police. She'd seen a lot of stuff about the increase in human trafficking on Facebook and she was worried that something terrible had happened to Anna Leigh.

"Maybe she was getting gas and someone grabbed her. I've heard that's what happens," she said.

The police found Anna Leigh's car at the law office where she had arrived the previous day and seemingly never left. According to another intern, she had behaved normally during the day and headed to the elevators at six thirty, saying that she "couldn't wait to sit on the couch and keep watching Friends." Somewhere between getting on the elevator and going to her car, Anna Leigh had been deterred from her plan. Maybe she had gotten a text from a friend and had taken an Uber to a second location. Maybe someone had picked her up. There were so many innocuous possibilities that it didn't even seem worth considering her death.

I was drinking my second cup of coffee and researching Tripp when I first stumbled across the forum. Tripp's sparse social media participation was rapidly being overtaken by the hordes online who were eager to pin Anna Leigh's disappearance on him. In response, he locked down all his accounts, but not before the forum was able to grab screenshots of his recent posts. I went to the forum hoping to find evidence of Tripp's misdeeds. What I found instead was fellowship.

Before I joined the forum, I would've said that I consumed true crime as much as any other ordinary American woman, which is to say quite a bit. We were obsessed with our own impending deaths, imagining danger in even the tamest of scenarios. Do enough research and nowhere is safe, not the Target parking lot, not your apartment complex, not the friendly neighborhood running trail. I wouldn't, however, have described myself as a true-crime junkie. I didn't listen to the podcasts or go to conventions. I drew a hard line in the sand between myself and those women. I was, I told myself, merely a concerned citizen.

In its nascent stages, the forum was united in its mission. First and foremost, the goal was to find Anna Leigh. This was linked to the second mission of persecuting Tripp for whatever harm he'd obviously caused her.

"Most violence toward women is committed by the men closest to them," wrote one user.

"It has to be Tripp," another person agreed. "It's always the boyfriend."

We analyzed his photos. Look at the way he's holding that dead fish, we said. It's hooked right in the eye. Or how his hand is wrapped possessively around Anna Leigh's waist, like he owns her. It wasn't the posture of two people in love, that was for sure. Or what about that other picture, the one of him and several hot girls who weren't Anna Leigh. Maybe he was cheating on her. Maybe he needed to make her disappear.

Unfortunately for us, Tripp had an alibi. There was CCTV footage of him leaving work, footage of him entering the bar with his friends, and footage of him stumbling toward his car hours later. The bar had a record of all the drinks charged to his tab, including a round of shots consumed minutes after Anna Leigh's disappearance. There were also dozens of people who could account for his actions throughout the evening, including two games of pool, one cigar smoked, and a fight that was narrowly avoided.

"I still don't trust Tripp," I posted on the forum, a post that was endorsed by a wave of approving emojis and gifs. "There's more than one way to kill a person besides with your own hands."

"Men," someone replied, "are never to be trusted."

I dedicated all of the energy that had previously gone into thinking about Max into finding Anna Leigh. See? I wanted to tell him. I'm not thinking about you at all. I had other hobbies besides obsessing over men who would never feel about me the way that I felt about them. I cared about missing girls, dead girls. I was a good person.

Instead of making graphics promoting the work that the nonprofit had done over the year while drinking my third and final cup of coffee for the day, I made graphics raising awareness about Anna Leigh. I felt warm and good as the number of shares climbed into the thousands. Finally! My skills were being used for something important.

As the afternoon deepened, the Anna Leigh backlash began. What about the Black women, the Indigenous women, who went missing with little to no fanfare? Yes, I said. We needed to care about them too, and I quickly reposted pictures of other missing women before watching seven separate videos of people breaking down the timeline of Anna Leigh's disappearance.

I went out for happy hour drinks with Meghan that were blissfully free of her boyfriend's presence. As much as I insisted that I was happy for her ("I'm so happy for you!" I told her when they first became official), I longed for a rift to come between them that would re-cement Meghan as my best friend, the person who was always there for me no matter what.

"Have you heard about Anna Leigh?" I asked her.

"Everyone has heard about Anna Leigh," she replied.

"It's awful," I said, sipping my margarita.

"Do you think she's still alive?" Meghan asked.

"I don't want to think any other way."

"It's good," she said, "to keep hope alive."