He steps into the room, hair tousled, expression caught somewhere between amused and predatory. “So. Now what?”
“Now,” I say, “I decide whether to keep her… or cut her loose.”
“Careful,” he murmurs. “She still thinks she’s on your side.”
I smile. “That’s the fun part. People are always more useful when they think they’re safe.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Evelyn
“Evelyn.” Blake doesn’t knock—just lets himself in. “The Watcher vanished last night.”
My cursor freezes over Shae’s face, half-smile suspended under the cool grade we built to make penitence look cinematic.
“Definevanished,” I say, because every crisis has a font and a timeframe.
“Site 404’d. Feeds wiped. X and Insta gone. Apple shows ‘no longer available.’” He swipes open his phone and thrusts it at me. “And—this.”
A screenshot: a green-bubble text to Harper, time-stamped 02:13 a.m.
You were wrong about her. Don’t make the same mistake twice.
I let the sentence sit in my mouth like sour candy. “Harper sent you this?”
“She forwarded it with a ‘what do we do’ this morning,” he says. “And a vomiting emoji. Not in that order.”
On my screen, the cut holds. Shae at Hearth & Hands, cheek turned toward a teenage volunteer like warmth can be measured in angles. I thumb the spacebar and let the action breathe: agentle brush of hair off a forehead, caught by three cameras and one producer’s quiet dread. Lila’s clipboard ghosts in the background.
Blake is still standing there like emergency furniture.
“Sit,” I tell him. “Before you vibrate through the floor.”
He drops into the side chair, knee bouncing. “This is bad for picture, right? Like—mysterious rival critic disappears right when we’re peaking sympathy?”
“It’s bad for any story that requires a counterweight,” I say. “Audiences like tension until it knots their stomach.”
He looks at the monitor; Shae’s laugh lands and we cut to black, a beat I’m still fighting for. “You think she?—”
“I think correlation is a fetish,” I say. “And it’s our job not to feed it. Yet.”
Blake rubs his jaw. “Harper’s spiraling. She didn’t sleep. James left for New York first thing this morning and suggested a digital detox. She responded with a paragraph that would make a priest take up vaping.”
“Good,” I say. “A rattled Harper makes better tape.”
He gives me a look like I kicked a kitten. “We’re… documenting a potential crime and you’re storyboarding reactions.”
“I’m triaging narrative,” I say. “If The Watcher is gone, we need a new axis. Until we confirm anything, panic is just noise.”
He scrubs both hands through his hair. “What if someone shut them up?”
“Then we have an obligation.”
“To—?”
“To edit carefully,” I say. “And to not hand a jury twelve episodes of prejudice cut to music.”
He laughs once, ugly. “Evelyn the Ethical. That’s new.”
