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Dear Annie,

Do you remember the day we met? Nikki introduced us, and all I could think was, “Damn. I’m gonna marry this girl one day.”

Sitting at the kitchen table in the townhouse the Trailblazers organization had put him up in, Nolan set the letters aside and frowned at his laptop. He’d read every one of Freddie’s letters several times, gleaning them for clues, but there was no smoking gun. He’d looked up the roster from fifteen years ago—again—in case he’d missed something the first time, but there was still no Frederic or Wilfred or derivative thereof. How was that possible?

Interestingly, he had noticed Assistant Coach Al Friedle listed on the roster, interesting if only because Nolan hadn’t known Friedle had ever been a Trailblazer.

Still, it was irrelevant.

He typed Freddie and Annie Vermont into the search bar on his computer.

There was a Facebook and Instagram page called Grandma Annie and Freddy. Annie was a retired schoolteacher and Freddy was her dog. Cute, but also irrelevant.

There was also Freddie’s Dirty Soda truck in Bennington, Vermont, a post congratulating Freddie the cat for finding his fur-ever home, and an obituary for a woman named Freddie Cross. Anne Cross was listed as one of her surviving children, but this definitely wasn’t the Freddie and Annie that Nolan was looking for.

Next, he typed Freddie and Annie Trailblazers into the search bar, and what loaded was ten pages of results dedicated to Annie Lennox and Freddie Mercury, who would, it seemed, be remembered as trailblazers in the music industry.

“Seriously,” Nolan muttered. “Who the fuck are you?”

Was Freddie a ghost?

Nolan had also briefly flipped through the two class notebooks that had been in the messenger bag, but they were just that—class notes for HST 2050, which, according to an online search, was History Methods at the University of Vermont, and PSYS 2100, which was Narrative Identity and Human Relationships at UVM—assuming those course codes corresponded to the same course titles fifteen years later.

Eli was taking a class at UVM. Maybe he could ask around? Although who he’d ask was anyone’s guess. Surely the same professors weren’t teaching HST 2050 and PSYS 2100 a decade and a half later. Or maybe they were; some professors stayed in their roles for years.

He twirled the button Eli had ripped off his shirt between two fingers and contemplated his next move. Annoyed with the situation, he called Eli.

“What if the person I should be looking for is Annie?” he asked as soon as Eli answered.

“Annie who? Oh, from the letters? Wait, you’re still on that?”

“Yeah.” Nolan slammed his laptop closed. “And since I’m not getting anywhere with Freddie, I thought I’d try to find Annie.”

“Okay.” A bark came from Eli’s end of the line. “What do we know about her?”

Setting the button aside, Nolan pulled the letters closer and unearthed the third one, skimming it until he found what he needed. He was sure he’d seen it somewhere . . . “She’s a school teacher.”

“Where?”

“I . . . don’t know.”

“What subject? Or grade?”

“I . . . don’t know. Oh wait—third grade.”

Eli’s silence was a very sarcastic What do you expect to uncover with that wealth of information?

Groaning, Nolan pinched the bridge of his nose.

He had to find Freddie. The compulsion went beyond simply wanting to get the letters back where they belonged. Nolan identified with Freddie in a way that was intrinsic. Freddie was struggling to fit in with the Trailblazers, and Nolan was struggling to fit in . . . pretty much anywhere.

The letters could’ve been written about him, and he wanted to track Freddie down and ask him if it had all worked out in the end.

Another bark sounded from Eli’s side, then a series of them. “Settle down, Cosmo. It’s not like you’ve never seen a squirrel before.”

“Do you have a dog?” Nolan asked. “I could swear you said your pets are hypothetical.”

“Cosmo’s not mine. He and his brother belong to Dabbs.”