“It isn’t,” I said quietly. “Not if we’re still pretending the law means something.”
Something flickered across his face—approval, yes, but also relief. He agreed with both the statementandthe sentiment. We’d worked together long enough now to finish each other’s sentences. To trust the silences. To know when a push would fracture the story—and when it was the only thing that would make it hold.
I turned slightly, checking the fall of the dress. Flint reached out without thinking, taking over setting up the mic wire on my back. His fingers were warm, practiced, sure.
The contact lingered half a second longer than necessary. I didn’t pull away. Neither did he.
In the mirror, Brewster’s jaw tightened.
Good.
Let him see it. Let him understand that whatever had burned between us in the dark didn’t own me. That my alliances were chosen in the light, with intention.
“You ready?” Flint asked quietly.
I nodded. “I won’t flinch.”
“I know.”
That was the thing.
He didn’t saybe careful. He didn’t saydon’t make it worse. He trusted me to step into it and decide how much heat I could withstand.
The producer knocked once, then opened the door. “Thirty seconds.”
Flint stepped back, professional again, but his hand brushed mine as I passed.
Brewster moved aside without comment as I walked past him toward the set. But I could feel the weight of his eyes as he tracked me—dark, unreadable, a storm held behind glass.
This was the cold war between us now. Not avoidance. Not denial. Mutual awareness sharpened into restraint. One of the makeup women was right there, a soft sweep of her brush against my forehead and chin. Removing the shine. But her eyes held elements of sorrow, she didn’t do anything else.
I nodded to her once and she returned the favor before she withdrew.
The lights warmed my skin as I took my seat. The room stilled. The countdown began.
Five.
Four.
Three.
The red light blinked on.
I looked straight into the camera.
“Good evening,” I said. “Tonight, I want to talk about accountability.”
I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t harden it either.
I talked about systems—how they were designed to catch misconduct before it metastasized. About law, process, oversight. About how justice was meant to be slow not because it was weak, but because it was deliberate.
I talked about Vincent Masters briefly. About patterns. About scrutiny.
And then I said his name.
“Colin Thorne was an attorney,” I said. “A meticulous one. He believed in process—not because it was clean or efficient, but because it was the only thing standing between accountability and chaos. He followed the law. He trusted mechanisms that were slow, imperfect, and often abused, because he believed they could still be corrected.”
I let that land.
