The door creaks. Blake’s head appears—hair messy, eyes too bright.
“You saw it?” he asks.
“Which?” My voice is too calm.
“The barrel.” He steps in. “Jesus, Evelyn, this could be?—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” I cut. “Not here.”
He closes the door anyway. “It’s connected. You feel it.”
“I don’t feel things. I cut them.”
He slams his palm against the doorframe. “And this?” He gestures to my laptop, the transcript glinting. “What are you cutting now, huh? Her voice? Dean’s truth? A maimed and broken woman’s therapy notes?”
I don’t answer. Because he’s right. And because the answer is worse.
The answer is: I’m cutting oxygen into fire.
I scroll through Dean’s words. Kelly’s neat little summaries of Shae’s violence. The Watcher’s last, desperate handoff. I think of Harper—naïve, malleable Harper—clutching Shae’s hand at donor dinners, whispering into a mic about redemption. What would she do if she read this? Break? Collapse? Finally see?
Or bury it too, because the world prefers survivors to monsters?
“We can’t sit on this,” Blake says.
“We can’t air it yet either,” I say.
“So we what—let her keep building her empire while we cut her as Mother Teresa?”
“She’s already Mother Teresa,” I snap. “We just polished the rosary beads.”
Silence sours. Blake’s jaw tightens. “You’re scared.”
“Of her?” I laugh, dry. “No. I’m scared of America. Of what they’ll do when you hand them truth without lighting it correctly. They’ll boo. They’ll unsubscribe. They’ll kill the season.”
His eyes cut to the monitor. Shae’s laugh repeats on a loop. “And you’ll keep serving them poison dressed as wine.”
“Until I know what to do with the glass,” I say.
We stand there, the footage playing between us like a third body.
I should feel triumphant—evidence, leverage, the missing puzzle piece. Instead the floor tilts. The Watcher’s last words echo:Don’t let her bury this.
And here I am, cursor hovering over the delete key, praying for deniability.
The cursor blinks. Shae blinks.
And I realize I’m already complicit.
The cursor blinks. I don’t.
Blake paces, chewing his thumbnail like he’s the martyr in my suite. “We drop it now,” he says, “and the whole machine grinds to a halt. Netflix. The funders. Harper’s entire goddamn brand. She’s finished.”
He says it like it’s a good thing—like I didn’t just spend eighteen months sculpting Shae Halston into a modern Joan of Arc.
“She’s not finished,” I say. “She’ll never be finished. Even if we air this.”
Blake stops. His eyes—dark as wet stone—pin me. “Then what the hell are we doing here, Evelyn?”
