“How did you get this information?” I ask.
“None of it is public,” Silas says. “Every official channel was a dead end. Every request hit a wall. Until I found Geena Morris.”
The name doesn’t ring a bell.
“She was married to the sheriff at the time,” Silas explains. “He tried to do the right thing by the girls.”
My chest tightens. “Tried?”
“He wound up at the bottom of a lake.”
I still. “He drowned?”
Silas shakes his head slowly. “He had no business being there. He was a careful man and a strong swimmer. Geena Morris swore up and down that he never went out swimming on his own. A series of…irregularities happened before his death. Enough that his wife believes he was murdered to keep him quiet.”
A cold thread of anger winds through me.
“What happened after?” I ask.
“The case was closed. Pretty damn fast.”
Silas reaches into the envelope again, pulling out a stack of copied documents. Notes. Photographs. Old reports yellowed with age.
“Morris kept everything. Her husband’s notes. His private files. She handed them over to me. It’s all in there.”
He pushes the envelope closer to me.
“But Justin,” he adds, voice lowering, “depending on what your investment is in this girl, I would seriously reconsider opening that file.”
I look at him properly this time, really taking him in. The angle of his shoulders. The careful stillness in his posture. The way his expression gives nothing away, as if he’s already decided what he’s willing to reveal and what he isn’t.
“Why?” I ask, the word slipping out quieter than I intend, threaded with confusion.
“Because one of the perpetrators,” Silas picks his words carefully, “was William Scott-Evans.”
The name hits like a physical blow. The room goes quiet in a way that feels wrong. Dangerous. I stare at the envelope, my hands still folded, unmoving.
William Scott-Evans.
The same William Scott-Evans who ended up in hospital on Alumni Weekend with suspected poisoning. The case I dismissed as inconsequential. A blip. A nuisance incident shaped by old habits that refuse to die.
Now it’s anythingbut.
It’s relevant in ways I never could have predicted—threads looping back on themselves, tightening with purpose, pulling toward something sharp and intentional. This isn’t coincidence. It never was.
Rowan Hale didn’t arrive on this campus by accident.
The unease that’s been coiled in my chest since the moment I learned her name finally clicks into place. It isn’t intuition. It isn’t paranoia.
It’s recognition.
She isn’t searching for answers.
She’s circling the truth—methodical, patient—waiting for the moment when it’s exposed enough to tear into. And without realizing it, I didn’t just cross her path.
I stepped directly into her line of fire.
19
