But neither would we.
For the first time since this started, I wasn’t thinking like a producer or a fixer or a friend who wished he could keep her out of the fire. I was thinking like someone who understood the rules had changed and so had the cost.
“Mallory…” I blew out a breath. “You’re not doing this alone anymore. We’re going to vet every single word.”
“You as in director, producer, or…?” she prompted.
I didn’t let her finish.
“In as the guy who’s buried friends and watched good reporting get eaten alive by bad framing,” I said. “I’m in as the one who knows the difference between truth and something thatsoundstrue enough to ruin you.”
She didn’t blink.
“Then you’re in,” she said simply.
I held her gaze for a beat longer, then nodded once. “Okay. Then we do this the right way.”
I stepped closer—not crowding her, just closing the distance enough to make this a conversation instead of a briefing.
“Before we write anything,” I said, “before we touch language or cadence or legal survivability, I want you to tell me what you actually want to say.”
Her brows knit slightly. “I already told you?—”
“Not the version you’d put on air,” I cut in. “Not the one that’s careful or defensible or smart.” I held up a hand when she started to push back. “The one you’d say if there wasn’t a camera. If you weren’t being watched. If you didn’t have to protect anyone—including yourself.”
She went still.
Good.
That was the tell.
I softened my tone just enough to keep her there. “Talk to me like I’m not your producer. Like I’m not the network. Like I’m just a guy who knows you well enough to hear it.”
She looked away, just briefly. Toward the window. Toward the city that was already chewing this up and spitting it back out as headlines.
Then she exhaled.
“He took Colin because he could,” she said quietly. “Not because Colin was guilty of anything. Not because he deserved it.”
I didn’t interrupt.
“He took him because Colin wasmine,” she continued. “Because Colin represented process. Law. The slow, boring mechanisms that are supposed to handle accountability without blood.” Her jaw tightened. “And because I said—on air—that violence isn’t justice.”
I felt that land in my chest like a weight.
“He wanted to prove me wrong,” she went on. “Or punish me for saying it.”
She turned back to me then, eyes bright with something sharp and unshed. “I didn’t invite him to kill. I invited him totalk. And he answered by making sure I understood the cost of that invitation.”
Anger tightened her expression.
I nodded slowly. “That’s the truth.”
“Yes,” she said. “And I want to say this—” Her voice steadied. “I want people to know that Colin Thorne was a person. Not a symbol. Not a chess piece. He believed in accountability through law. He believed fraud doesn’t carry a death sentence in this country.”
My throat tightened despite myself.
“I want to say that whatever the Auditor thinks he’s correcting,” she continued, “he’s wrong. Because killing the process doesn’t purify it. It just leaves rot with no remedy.”
