Chapter One:
Boomerang, Part Three

APRIL 14TH, 2022

1230 LOCAL
ARTHUR - BRUMBY RESIDENCE
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

Fans of classic literature will be familiar with Jane Austen's Emma. Fans of classic movies will be familiar with Audrey Hepburns' Princess Ann in Roman Holiday. Fans of 90's movies will be familiar with Cher from Clueless, and fans of modern reality TV will be familiar with at least on Kardashian.

All of these women paved the way for Eleanor AnnMarie Brumby to become the woman she is today. There was very little that she found herself wishing for, and most things in life came to her easily. As for the things that she found difficult, she gave them enough effort so that people could say she was trying, then would give up when everyone stopped paying attention.

Ellie just didn't see the point in stressing herself out, hence why she started her days promptly at noon and not a moment earlier. Her mother, Gillian, didn't seem to mind it that much, but Ellie's habits were beginning to bother her father, Mic.

"Good morning, Daddy."

"Morning, Ellie."

It was one thing for Mic to be sitting on the sofa at noon, it was a Saturday. Plus he was lucky enough to retire early; he had earned the right to lounge around.

Ellie entered the living wearing pajama shorts and a t-shirt, her bright pink robe billowing behind her. She climbed onto the sofa, sitting down right next to Mic. "It's so early," she said with a yawn, "How long have you been up?"

Mic looked up from his iPad. He shrugged. "I got up at about nine…" he checked his watch. "It's already the afternoon."

"No it's not, the sun's barely up," Ellie looked over her shoulder, peering out the living room window.

"I know but it's….after noon," Mic showed Ellie his watch.

"Oh!" Ellie's face brightened. "This is a record for me. Usually I get up after two."

This was something Mic was well aware of. For the past three days, Ellie had walked into the kitchen while Mic and Gillian were fixing dinner and had asked for pancakes. The first day, Mic thought she had just gotten confused and mistaken the sun setting for the sun rising, but then he noticed the pattern, and realized that his daughter was suddenly nocturnal.

Mic adored his daughter - really, he did. Ellie was the first child he'd ever met that he enjoyed the company of. In fact, Ellie was probably the only child Mic had ever met that he didn't view as a nuisance to some degree. That wasn't to say that Eleanor, in the twenty-some years Mic had known her, hadn't proven herself to be a nuisance at all, but rather a nuisance he was more than willing to put up with.

In short, Ellie was the only person in the world that could make Mic Brumby reconsider being a complete and utter asshole.

"Do you have any plans for the day - or what's left of it, rather?" Mic asked.

Ellie stretched. "Well, I have to eat something-"

"A late lunch or early dinner?"

"And then I need to make a quick trip to the gym-"

"Before the sun sets, I suppose?"

"And then I need to pack-"

That comment caught Mic's attention. He looked up at Ellie. "Packing?" his brow furrowed. "Packing for what? Where are you going?"

Mic and Gillian had gradually been trying to nudge their baby bird out of the nest for the past year or so, but the closer and closer Ellie got to turning twenty-three, the more resistant she seemed to the idea of moving out of her parent's home. Mic found it highly doubtful that she decided to suddenly move out on a random Friday afternoon.

Ellie responded with a shrug. "I'm taking a weekend trip to Melbourne with some girlfriends."

Mic raised an eyebrow. "You're going all the way to Melbourne? For a weekend?"

"It's only a ninety minute flight."

"Right."

"And the flight's in five hours," Ellie hopped up from the sofa and stretched, punctuating her sentence with a yawn. "Better get going."

Mic's eyes widened. "What do you mean, the flight's in five hours?"

"I mean, it's in five hours."

"That doesn't give you a whole lot of time, love."

Ellie shrugged again. "Mummy's driving me. We'll make it on time."

Gillian had this incredible, uncanny ability to believe she would be on time for everything regardless of how late she was running - and Ellie had inherited this belief system.

Mic was a lot of things, but late wasn't one of them. He especially wasn't late to the airport.

"I can drive you Ellie, it's not that big of an issue," he said as he watched Ellie walk out of the living room. "I don't want you to miss your flight-"

Ellie turned around and folded her arms across her chest. "Daddy, the flight isn't for another five hours-"

"And by the time you eat, got to the gym, and pack you'll have considerably less than five hours."

"Daddy it'll be fine! Stop worrying about it!"

A lot of the time when Mic and Ellie got into disagreements, it often felt like Mic was getting into an argument with himself. He supposed this was some kind of karma - having a child that got every ounce of his stubbornness. Ellie also had the tendency to believe herself to always be in the right, something Mic also believed about himself. Whenever the two of them disagreed about something, which wasn't often but often enough, either a stalemate was declared or a solution was reached by way of a third party intervention - that third party usually being Gillian. Rarely ever were they able to come to an agreement on their own.

However, oftentimes Mic would recognize that he was the parent in the situation and Ellie was the child, so if the point of conflict was petty he would concede. This was one of those situations. After all, Ellie missing a flight wasn't a matter of life and death, though she would most likely treat it as such.

"Alright love, have a safe trip."

"Thanks, I will!"

Mic listened as Ellie's footsteps faded as she headed down the hall to the kitchen, wondering to himself how someone could be so different from him yet so similar at the same time.

A few minutes later, Gillian entered the living room, also wearing her robe and pajamas. Mic took comfort in the fact that he knew she just now wasn't getting up - in fact, Gillian had been the one to wake Mic up at six-thirty that morning. It was just her habit to stay in her pajamas on her days off.

Mic had originally wondered why Gillian had taken the day off in the first place, but now he knew why.

"I hear you're taking Ellie to the airport," Mic said as Gillian walked over to the window and drew the curtains back.

"Yeah, she's going to Melbourne for the weekend," Gillian looked down at Mic in confusion. You didn't know?"

"No, I didn't know," Mic replied. "Not until five minutes ago, at least. You know, I wish she would tell me she's going to do stuff before she just does it-"

"She's twenty-two Mic, she's not a child," Gillian walked around Mic to the other end of the sofa, picking up a throw pillow and fluffing it. "The reason why she doesn't tell you things is because she knows you're just going to try and micromanage her like you do with every other person on the planet."

"I don't micromanage."

Gillian gave him a look."

"I don't micromanage as much," Mic sighed and sat his iPad down. "I wouldn't have to micromanage as much if she was twenty-two and was able to get to the airport on time. Gillian, her flight's in five hours and she hasn't even packed yet, and she's going to to gym-"

"Her flight's at ten thirty. That's in eight hours."

Mic's eyebrows shot up. "But she told me-"

"I told her the flight left at seven," Gillian said. "That way I knew she'd be ready on time," she bent down and kissed Mic's cheek. "You're not the only one who still likes to micromanage, love."

THE NEXT MORNING
ARTHUR - BRUMBY RESIDENCE
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

There were several things that Gillian Arthur prided herself on, but one of the things was the fact that she was a 'cool mom.' She wasn't cool in the way Amy Poehler was in the movie Mean Girls, but she was still cool. Granted, she had no concrete proof that she was a cool mom, but she liked to think that the fact that all of Ellie's friends followed her on Instagram and let her follow them back was proof enough.

Because of this access, Gillian knew that Ellie was not in Melbourne with friends like she had told her parents. Ellie might've been in Melbourne, as evident by her Instagram story of her hotel room, but her friends were not with her.

Alison and Julia were both in Sydney, and Mackenzie was on vacation with her boyfriend in California…in short, none of them were with Ellie.

Then who was with Ellie? That was a question Gillian was trying to puzzle out over breakfast with Mic. She had purposefully neglected to tell him her discovery, knowing that he would probably drive to Melbourne that night to figure out what she was actually doing there.

"Look, I know we've probably run out of things to talk about considering it's been twenty years, but I don't think I've turned into that boring company."

Gillian looked up from her phone screen, catching Mic looking at her from across the table apprehensively.

"Sorry," she smiled and sat her phone down on the table. "I was…looking at emails."

Mic raised an eyebrow. "On a Saturday?"

"I missed a lot on my day off," Gillian explained, lying through her teeth. She was sure this was probably true, but she would have no way of knowing this. She hadn't checked her emails since six o'clock Thursday evening.

"You know that place can run without you, right?"

"Oh I know," Gillian smirked as she reached for the syrup. "I've had my hands full since you decided to go into an early retirement."

A conventional marriage was not something that had appealed to Mic and Gillian. In fact, marriage in general was not something that had appealed to them, so they decided to unite themselves in a way that they found fitting for their relationship and mutually beneficial for the both of them: business. In 2004, when they decided to start their own law firm together, they both had their reservations, but luckily enough, Brumby & Arthur had flourished, even though Brumby was going on almost a year in retirement.

"Have you heard anything from Ellie?"

Gillian shook her head. "No. Have you?"

"Nope."

"I'm sure she's just having a good time with her friends, love."

She's having a good time with someone.

Ellie being in Melbourne by herself was surely a possibility, but a slim one. She was a social butterfly; if there was an opportunity to not to do something by herself, she would take it.

After breakfast, Gillian took up her usual weekend residency in the lawn chair by the pool and did some further sleuthing. She didn't realize how much you could find out about someone from their social media until Ellie had shown her the power of internet stalking a few year prior. Gillian felt bad using skills she'd learned Ellie against her, but the greater good was at stake. She needed to know who her daughter was with for her own safety - Gillian was also just incredibly nosey.

The first thing Gillian picked up on was a comment from a username she didn't recognize. It was on Ellie's most recent post, one from a couple days prior. This same username had left a comment on the three posts before that, going three months.

So it was someone Ellie knew, obviously…someone that she had neglected to tell her parents about. This person was a boy too…

Gillian Arthur was not stupid; she was able to put the pieces together.

Clicking on the boy's profile, Gillian was discouraged to see that his account was private. It looked like she was going to have to figure out who AJ Roberts was some other way.

Yeah...for those of you who decided to skip over Chapter 39 of The Case because it was all about Mic...you may want to revisit it - if you wish. I was on the fence about including that chapter, but I decided that it would provide some much needed backstory in the event that I decided to write a sequel...and here we are. If you thought that chapter was a little out of place in The Case, now you know why I put it there.

As much as you guys are going to probably hate me for bringing Mic back and any family members that may be associated with him...I'm a sucker for a good Romeo & Juliet story. I simply couldn't resist. I will go the extra mile to make Mic just a tinge out of character just so he'll be less insufferable to read, I promise.

Thanks for reading! Welcome back to The Case!

-Harper