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“Yes,” she is completely unbothered. “This is what that looks like.”
A dull, persistent thrum is vibrating behind my eyeballs. The onset of a stress-induced cephalgia; frankly, I find it anomalous that my nervous system maintained homeostasis for this long.
“For what it’s worth,” she picks at the corner of her black nail polish, “you’re handling this very well. You haven’t turned the car around, or dissociated in order to keep pressing forward, or even mentioned running over anyone connected to your past.”
“Yet,” I say.
The highway unspools. The sky has transitioned into that washed-out, late-afternoon diffusion, a shift in lighting that renders the entire landscape as though it were temporarily suspended in a vacuum.
We stop at a random gas station because the car demands it and because neither of us has eaten anything that actually qualifies as food.
Inside the station, I grab a cup of aggressively over-brewed coffee, a chalky protein bar, and a plastic-wrapped breakfast sandwich that may have been edible when they put it out eight hours ago. Tamsin disappears entirely.
Back in the car, halfway through my dry biscuit and burnt sausage combo, I open my phone and click into the Study Room message board more out of habit than intention.
It’s a holdover from grad school that somehow survived—a forum for people who prefer their conversations threaded, footnoted, and lightly hostile.
It’s also where I met Lila and Calla, my unnecessarily brilliant best friends, which feels impossible given how much time the rest of the board spends being wrong.
Lila arrived first—bubbly, always right, fully incapable of letting bad logic stand uncontested.
Calla followed not long after, all sharp instincts and chaotic compassion, posting long replies at two in the morning that somehow managed to be both utterly unhinged and fully correct. I was a little smitten with her, in a purely friend-shaped way.
We were supposed to just be random online acquaintances, like everyone else there.
At some point, it became something more, and we haven’t looked back.
I scroll.
Someone has posted a photo of what is definitely not human remains and asked if anyone can “ID from vibes.” I keep scrolling.
A threat titled Taphonomy Question (No Judgement Please) catches my eye.
I open it.
A man with a profile picture featuring sunglasses indoors has written six paragraphs about how bones weather in the wild and ends it by asking if scavenging can basically erase murder.
I reply, annoyed, before I can stop myself.
Weathering alters surface characteristics; it doesn’t rewrite context, sequence, or cause of death—a distinction any first-year student would understand. Scavenging can complicate recovery, not “erase” homicide. If it could, we’d all be out of a job. Curious line of inquiry, though.
I close the thread, satisfied that I didn’t explicitly accuse him of being an uneducated serial killer.
Two posts down, my stomach drops.
Cold Case Discussion: Casey Whitmore (Podcast Mention)
Because, of course.
Someone has linked an episode from Dead Ends. They’ve summarized it enthusiastically, with timestamps and bullet points, layering speculation over fact and opinion over both. It’s thorough. It’s compelling. And it contains multiple details that are incorrect.
I don’t listen to true crime podcasts. Not Dead Ends, not Casket Case, not The Last Place She Was Seen—none of them.
I’m sure it’s engaging, something to play during a commute or while folding laundry. The voices are calm, the music dramatic, the story neatly arranged into episodes with satisfying cliffhangers. But the cases themselves rarely cooperate with that kind of structure. Real investigations stall. Evidence goes missing. Families keep living inside the uncertainty long after the audience has moved on to the next story. I spend enough time with the consequences of violence in my professional life. I have no interest in hearing it packaged as entertainment.
For some people this is a story. For me, it’s my friend.
And Casey Whitmore is not simply a cliffhanger.
