Page 99 of Someone Just Followed You

‘Brandon,’ Maple repeats. But then her pale face glows beetroot. ‘Shit, that’s stupid. Of course you’ve met him before.’

Brandon. Why is that name familiar?

Oh God.

Chapter 115

Maple & Dylan

@7Harts<3, TikTok

Bodi and I have been praying for the safe return of Maple Clark to her family, and our hearts are warm, knowing those prayers have been answered. However, due to several credible death threats over the last few weeks, we have decided to step back from social media now and concentrate on raising our beautiful family in private.

Maple: Hey everyone, yep, I’m back.

Dylan: Alive, healthy, and even smiling.

Maple: Which has a lot to do with Dylan, and my dad, and my little brother and sister, for rescuing me. But it also has a lot to do with you guys. For following my story, sharing it, and giving Dylan the clues that meant he knew where to look. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Dylan: We’ve also got some special thank-yous to make. Thank you Ryan, and Chris, and Sam, and Claudia, and Tyler, plus Tyler’s dad. Without your intel, we wouldn’t have found Maple. There’s a couple more thank-yous to make, but that comes later.

Maple: So you might have seen that I’ve shut down my Maybe Maple channel now – I guess I’m done with acting the squeaky-clean little girl when half my followers are dirty old men – but we wanted you to hear how my story ended. Except some of this stuff isn’t easy to talk about, so Dylan’s helping me out.

Dylan: I guess that’s what friends are for. Will I start with Coco?

Maple: No, let’s start with my mom.

Dylan: Hmm okay. Well, on our last show, you probably remember that Maple’s dad told us about Blake. Well, it turns out that Blake was lying – he isn’t a modeling agent – but he isn’t a pedophile either. And you could say, at a stretch, that he was lying for the right reasons.

Maple: So my mom probably doesn’t deserve all the hate she’s getting. She’s not perfect, jeez, I know that, but she’s sorry. So if you guys could lay off her a little, I’d appreciate it.

Dylan: While Coco does deserve all your hate.

Maple: Except not Coco, because Coco doesn’t exist.

Dylan: And luckily neither does Jake Carter now, the fifty-one-year-old man who used the latest AI technology to pretend to be a fourteen-year-old girl, just so he could get close to Maple.

Maple: And then got so jealous of me being friends with Dylan that he decided to kidnap me. He chained me to a bed and he … well he didn’t do that, what you’re thinking, but …

Dylan: He treated Maple like she belonged to him, to do whatever he wanted with. Like take photos of her when she was chained up. And it turns out that Jake Carter has been obsessed with watching girls in distress since he was a kid. Some of you might know that Coco’s YouTube channel was about a girl called Sophie Lyle who was raped and murdered in her home. Coco made out that it happened three years ago in Miami, but the FBI told us that it actually happened in 1986, in Phoenix, Arizona.

Maple: And the reason Jake was hung up on the case was because he was there. An eleven-year-old witness. He lived next door to Sophie’s family and was obsessed with their cat apparently. He’d climb out of his bedroom window at night and go into their garden to look for it. And he was there the night Sophie was killed.

Dylan: I mean, we’re thinking that he was a weird kid already, fixating on a cat like that. But then he sees a girl attacked, terrified, probably screaming, begging for the guy to stop.

Maple: And he kinda loves it. Gets excited by it.

Dylan: The FBI found thousands of images on his PC of women and girls in trouble. Women being mugged by strangers or pushed around by boyfriends, girls being hassled by groups of guys. He was addicted to seeing women in pain.

Maple: And as well as thousands of images of me, the FBI also found photos of a woman called Nikki from when she was a kid. And he used her image to become Coco, and trick me into trusting him. Nikki discovered this, and reported it, which meant the FBI knew where to start looking. So if you’re watching, Nikki, thank you so much.

Dylan: AI has given child abuse a whole new look, and it’s a disgusting one.

Maple: Which brings us to Ella Hart, the reason we set this show up in the first place. It’s awkward, because we have to respect Ella’s wishes to stay hidden, but we know how invested you guys have been in Ella’s story, so …

Dylan: So yeah, we found her. Or Maple’s mom did anyway. And apparently, she’s fine. More than fine, doing great, living her best life.

Maple: But my mom isn’t always the best at judging these things. It’s not her fault; her brain just isn’t wired that way. So, Ella, if you’re watching, we just want to tell you three things and then we’ll let you be.