"Wait a minute!" Chad turned on his heels halfway down the pathway. "Was June the daughter?"

The woman glowering from the patio stared harder at him. "I thought you two said you were her friends or a fiancé?" The word dripped with sarcasm. "Get your butts off my property. Now, you mongrels!" She reached for the nearest weapon she could find—a broom—and charged down the steps as if she was ready to sweep the idiots off her property.

Chad rushed to get his phone out and bring up his wallpaper. With his head turned away—in case she attacked—he thrust the phone screen towards the woman just as she came within arm's length of him. "Please, just look. This is June. My June. Have you seen her before?"

By the time he opened his eyes and took a peek at the woman, all his fears of being attacked abated. The expression on the woman's face told him she knew the girl in the photo with Chad all right. The girl who happily smiled at the camera, just hours before he popped the question, and then proceeded to run away. Terry had taken that photo after the award.

"You know her?" he asked, his throat suddenly clamping.

Jo marched back to join him, probably realising that he hadn't followed her to the car. "That's not June, is it?" she asked, and Chad felt an odd shock course through his body when the woman shook her head.

"Who is she then?" Jo asked, glancing at Chad as she did.

Chad stood speechless, an unfamiliar feeling of discomfort swirling in his chest. It felt like heartburn in all honesty. Perhaps this was what heartbreak felt like, true heartbreak. A damn heartburn.

"That's Amari's daughter, Yumi."

"Yumi?" Jo shook her head. "Why would she tell us her name was June all this time?"

"Joon's her mother's name." The lady looked up, tears stinging her eyes. "Poor thing... to think she goes by her mother's name these days... her middle name's Joon too, come to think of it."

"Yumi?" The name escaped Chad's lips in a whisper, unaccustomed to that sound. She hadn't even told him her real name all this time? All this time he'd spent planning a life with her, smitten, to the moon and back. And she hadn't even told him her name. Yumi.

Yumi.

He eyed the vacant lot next door, at the tall grass perfect for snakes and spiders. At the charred stumps of a fire that had once been... a fire raging inside him now. How could she not tell him her name? Had any of it been real? Any of it?

He cleared his throat, afraid he was going to cry. "So what happened here?" He nodded towards the remnants of a house once there, along with a family.

The lady glanced at the house once and then at the siblings. "You say you know Yumi?"

They both nodded.

Jo spoke for him. "Chad met her living in a park more than a year ago. They've kind of been together since."

Chad, still staring vacantly at the lot, added, "Couple of days ago, I even proposed..."

When he didn't go on any more, Jo volunteered to answer the unasked question on the woman's lips. "Next morning, she was gone. She left behind the ring and this letter" — she rummaged through her bag and pulled out the small wad of papers, June's letter, and held it out to the woman. "Left it next to his pillow."

The woman lightly scoffed. "The girl hasn't changed much then. Flakey as a filo pastry, always fleeting about from one no-good boyfriend to another. Even that night of the fire, she stormed out of the house and onto the back of some Harley-hooting no good douchebag, waking everybody up in the middle of the night...."

No-good boyfriends. How many? Chad's heartburn intensified. Was he one of these no-good boyfriends? Was he a boyfriend at all? I mean, she didn't even tell me her name...

"When was the last time you saw her, Mrs...?" Jo queried, for Chad's brain was a mush of questions, none of which were going to help him find her... Yumi.

The lady studied them before answering, "Surve, Mrs Surve. And I haven't seen her since the funeral... It devastated her... It's a bit of a story, but she blamed herself... Why don't you come in from the rain for a cuppa and I'll tell you what happened."

Chad hesitated. He didn't want to sit down and listen to some story. He wanted to find her, find her that very instance, and demand answers. Was any of it ever true?! But in order to find her, he had to walk her path a bit. After all, that's what she wanted, for him to know her past and still choose her in the end, if he still wanted.

And at that very moment, standing at the bottom of Mrs Surve's porch, with the rain drizzling rain about them, Chad wasn't sure how he felt. Would he still want her at the end of this debacle? At the end of the road, when he met his June, but someone else's Yumi, would he still want her forever? A woman he didn't know?

"Come on, we've come this far, we may as well find out what we can about her... Yumi." Jo tugged at his elbow, pulling him behind her.

"So you said you met her living in a park?" the lady asked as they stepped in, into another house that looked similar to their mother's, except the couple here were likely more together than their folks.

"Yeah," Chad heard his vacant voice answer as he closed the door behind them, trembling hands on the doorknob.

He wanted to be anywhere but there, so close to the place where she'd once lived. June. Yumi. Whoever she was...

Was any of it ever real? The question wouldn't leave him alone.