Notnothing.Just nothingvisible.
I stared at my screen again, as if I could conjure a response through sheer resentment. My browser was a mess of open windows. Clips. Threads. Speculation. Commentators turning my face into a Rorschach test.
To some, I looked defiant, daring him to answer. To others, reckless, high on my own proximity to danger. One man with a podcast and no qualifications called it “seductive provocation,” which told me far more about him than it ever would about me.
A panel froze a still frame mid-blink and argued over whether my eyes showed fear or calculation. Another slowed my voice to half-speed, dissecting pauses like they wereaccidental confessions instead of deliberate restraint. Body-language experts—self-appointed and aggressively confident—declared my posture either too relaxed to be afraid or too rigid to be honest.
Everyone saw what they wanted. Everyone heard what fit their narrative.
The worst part was that after the fiftieth take, the hundredth replay, I could feel it working. Not doubt, exactly—but erosion. The kind that doesn’t ask permission. The kind that makes you wonder, briefly, whether your facehadbetrayed something you thought you’d kept contained.
Congratulations, Mallory. No response, no new facts—and somehow you were still being explained to yourself by men monetizing their so-called expertise, narrating your intentions in hour-long videos with the confidence of people who believed access was the same thing as insight.
I clicked to a local news site. Then another. Then I went smaller—city blogs, neighborhood forums, the kind of places where people posted grainy security footage and asked strangers if they recognized the man in the hoodie.
Then, because apparently I had no remaining self-respect to lose, I opened the police blotter.
I started local and pushed outward—county, state, anything that might plausibly intersect. It was a compulsion I didn’t like admitting to even in my own head. The kind you dressed up as diligence when it was really just hunger.
The list scrolled on, dull and ugly in equal measure. Assaults outside bars. Domestic calls logged and cleared. Drunk drivers. Shoplifting. A stabbing that looked personal and therefore uninteresting to anyone like him. A body found in a park that turned out to be an overdose.
Tragic. Ordinary. Closed.
No patterned language. No signatures. No artfully staged scene screaming to be noticed. No one dead in the way that mattered to my case.
The relief that should have come with that didn’t arrive.
Instead, there was only irritation—sharp and petulant and uncomfortably close to disappointment. Which made me hate myself a little. Maybe more than a little.
Because the absence of reports didn’t feel like safety. It meant either they hadn’t found it yet, or there wasn’t anything to be found.
Like the held breath before impact. The quiet stretch of road right before the headlights appeared. A clock ticking down somewhere you couldn’t see, couldn’t hear clearly—only feel in your bones that it was running out.
My thumb hovered over refresh again.
And that’s when the disgust flared—hot, immediate, unmistakable. Because there it was. Me, doing exactly what I accused audiences of doing. Chasing the next beat. The next escalation. Anything to end the unbearable stretch of waiting.
I wanted something to happen.
That realization tasted foul.
I pushed the laptop away a few inches, as if distance could somehow restore my moral high ground or steady my nerves. As if I hadn’t already crossed the line the moment I hoped—just a little—for confirmation.
“This is what he wants,” I said, mostly to myself. A confession more than a conclusion.
Brewster didn’t pretend he hadn’t heard.
“What?”
The last thing I wanted was to unpack that sentence. Especially with him. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Bullshit.”
He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t even look at me right away. Just delivered the word like someone lobbing a grenade and already turning away from the blast radius. He lifted his coffee and took a slow sip, eyes flicking back to the tablet in his hand as if we were enjoying a casual morning conversation about what happened on a previous night’s television binge.
I felt my jaw tighten. “You don’t get to interrogate my internal monologue.”
“I’m not,” he said mildly. “It wasn’t internal.”
