I type, erase, type again.
ME:I’m good. Hydrating. Working. You?
Three dots. Then:
JAMES:Meeting in 20. Dinner with Pete after. Call you late?
ME:Yes.
I leave my phone facedown so I don’t have to watch it breathe.
The room shrinks. Tonight it’s a box with me in it and a recording that breaks my career, my reputation, my… what. Belief? I don’t do belief. I do proof—with a good edit. But this is proof. The kind that doesn’t trend. The kind that gets ignored because it’s ugly.
“They want a survivor,” I tell the empty room. “They don’t want a villain who smiles for the camera.”
My voice startles me. I sound like the women I interview right before they stop replying to my emails.
I copy the file to a thumb drive. Another to my cloud. I slide the drive into a lipstick tube and snap it shut, because the movies taught me something useful for once.
Then I sit on the floor and laugh once—sharp. Like it belongs to someone else.
“I thought I knew the truth,” I tell the room. “But I don’t know anything.”
I close the laptop so I don’t have to see my reflection in the screen.
On the coffee table, the ring box sits where James left it the morning he left for New York—silly and hopeful. The morning after the gala. It feels like a lifetime ago now, but it’s only been a little over a week.
I press the cold lipstick tube to my throat where my pulse jerks. I can feel the backup drive rattle inside. The Watcher’s voice. Shae’s laugh. Declan’s joke. The wolf in white.
“You’re not crazy, Harper,” The Watcher said.
Good. I’m not crazy.
I’m awake.
And the monster is about to meet her reckoning.
Chapter Forty-Two
Evelyn
The feed opens with a small, senseless domestic sound that always makes my skin spark—the click of a door finding its strike plate, the hush after, two women breathing into a swallow of silence.
I’m the backup plan. Harper’s silent witness.
Shae’s heels click across hardwood of the AirBnB in Ojai like a model on a runway.
Harper Lane’s makeshift studio has walls padded like a velvet coffin; even the air feels edited. My earbuds make it intimate, like I’m wedged between them.
“Levels are good,” Harper says, voice light, performative. “This is Harper Lane, and today I’m honored to welcome back a woman whose story has moved millions?—”
Shae lets out a low chuckle that could melt ice. “Honored is such a heavy dress, Harper. Let’s keep it casual. Two friends piecing together a truth.”
“Friends,” Harper repeats. “Right.”
Her chair creaks. She clears her throat twice—the second time smaller. She isn’t sure whether to bow or bite. I smile and settle deeper on my couch, glass of pinot at my knee. Harperasked me to listen “just in case.” She didn’t say the word she meant: be a witness.
“The last podcast of the season. Are you ready?”
