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“She might know who the murderer was,” Anna muttered to herself, staring at her notes on the table, her fingers lightly trembling. The truth has been hidden for a decade now.

She stood up abruptly, the creak of her leather chair echoing in the quiet room. Outside, the rain began to pour harder, its relentless sound matching the chaos inside her mind.

"Book me the earliest flight to London, and try to get in contact with Mr. and Mrs. Lay as soon as possible. I have some news for them regarding Amelia." Her voice was steady, almost cold, but there was a flicker of something deeper behind her eyes. She turned to her secretary, who stood by the door, pen poised above a notebook.

“Sure, of course, Mrs. Raynott,” her secretary replied, but the hesitation in Anna’s voice betrayed her. Anna could tell. She could always tell when people were nervous. “Is everything... alright, Mrs. Raynott?”

Anna gave a tight smile. “Everything will be, if we can get to the bottom of this.” Anna looked away to the clock on the wall. “I need to leave as soon as possible, and please make sure the flight is non-stop and no delays.”

Her secretary nodded quickly and exited the room, leaving Anna alone with her thoughts. She moved to the window, watching the rain beat against the glass. The storm was nothing compared to the storm brewing inside her. The Lay family. The truth. The hidden stories. It was all coming together now.

Anna ran a hand through her dark hair and exhaled deeply, the weight of the case pressing down on her shoulders. She wasn’t used to being this close to the truth, this close to revealing everything.

She crossed the room to her desk and pulled open the drawer where she kept her notes and files. Beneath a stack of paperwork, she found what she was looking for - the manuscript of the novel The Silent Shadow written by Julian Marlowe, once a renowned detective fiction author, but found dead in his home just a few weeks ago, a tragic suicide that shocked the literary world. Anna had been his former literary editor, working alongside him until she moved to Hawaii with her husband two years ago. She gazed at the torn remnants of the last missing chapter of the manuscript, her mind swirling with questions. What had this chapter contained, and why had it been ripped away so deliberately?