“For everything you’re about to hear,” he says, setting a portable recorder on my desk. “Jail calls. Declan. Her. It’s… laugh tracks and chess moves.”
“Hit play,” I say.
He does.
Shae’s voice pours out, low and amused—the kind of sound you’d follow into a dark room on purpose.
“…no, it’s easy when you give people a job,” she’s telling someone—the vocal print matches Declan’s baritone, flattened by the jail phone. “Kindness is a button. You press, they light.”
A chuckle from the other end. “And me?”
“You’re not a button,” she says. “You’re a mirror. You wanted to see a good woman when you looked.”
“And you?”
“I gave you what you wanted,” she says, and then laughs—the soft one I’ve laid under a hundred shots.
Blake watches my face instead of the waveform. “Do we… air this?”
“We don’t air anything,” I say. “We arrange. And we wait to see what arrangement the world deserves.”
He sinks into the chair and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Evelyn, if The Watcher is in a river somewhere?—”
“Then we aren’t the police,” I say, sharper than I meant. “And yet. We make choices like they do. Which truth. Which angle. Whose body becomes a plot point.”
He drops his hands. “I didn’t sign up to be a cop.”
“You signed up to make beautiful lies tell a kind truth,” I say. “Sometimes the inverse happens.”
I slam markers into the timeline. OPTION A: SAINT. OPTION B: SIREN. OPTION C: SYMPATHY WITH A KNIFE.
“Send Georgina a note,” I tell Blake. “Tell her the cut’s on schedule and we’re not making editorial statements about phantom podcasters. Yet.”
“And Harper?”
“Keep her close,” I say. “Close people don’t get lost as easily.”
He nods, and for once does exactly what I ask without a quip.
When the door shuts, I look at Shae’s frozen face on my monitor. I picture a woman with a mic and a brand erasing herself at two in the morning. I picture a text—You were wrongabout her—sitting in a phone like a sermon you wish you’d never heard.
“Vanished,” I say aloud, tasting the word.
My job is to make disappearances safe for network television. My job is to make evil palatable, good suspicious, pain consumable in forty-seven minutes with ad breaks.
I nudge the cursor two frames back and watch Shae flinch at the donor’s touch again. This time, I leave it exactly where it is.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Shae
Blake sleeps in the guest room, but I know he isn’t sleeping. He’s in there replaying Harper’s confession about her sister, looping it like a favorite song. I’d do the same.
The recording is gold. Not because of the content—one dead loser at the bottom of a quarry isn’t exactlyDateline—but because of what it means. She’s mine now. People like Harper think their skeletons stay in closets. I prefer them in glass display cases.
I think about how close Blake is to Evelyn and wonder, briefly, if he’s playing both of us. Then I decide I don’t care. I’m the one in control. I’m the puppeteer; he’s the fool with the camera.
Harper texts at 9:13.
