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The burglaries that happened all those years ago look very different.

“Mara saw something and took it because that's what Mara did. Maybe she thought she'd give them back. Maybe she didn't think about it at all. Who the fuck knows?”

“If you knew, why not take them from her?”

His mouth twists. “If I'd known then, do you really think we'd be having this conversation? I figured it out later. There wasn't anyone else. Casey swore she'd copied that recording, and I tore apart every place I could think of looking for it. Nothing. For years, nothing. Until the tapes resurfaced.”

I study him. “How did you know they resurfaced?”

“Baryn told me.”

The answer doesn't make sense. “Baryn told you?”

I search backward through every conversation I've had with Baryn since the tapes appeared. He told Evan. He told Simon. And he told⁠—

Cebastian.

His executive producer.

“Oh my god.”

Every update. Every new piece of evidence. Every question Baryn had taken back to the person funding and producing his show.

All of it had gone to Ian. “You're Cebastian. I mean, I know you're Cebastian. But you're Cebastian, Cebastian. What the fuck?”

The realization is so absurd that my mind rejects it before immediately beginning to reorganize everything around it. Ian hadn't somehow learned that the tapes appeared on my doorstep. Baryn had told him.

“You assumed it was Mara,” I say. “She never told you what she'd done. You just knew she had the tapes, so when Baryn told you they'd shown up at my house, you knew she'd given them back.”

“She probably didn't even know what was on them,” Ian mutters.

Mara could have found them among the things she'd taken, recognized them as Casey's, and returned them because years of guilt finally outweighed her need to keep them.

But Ian knew what they could contain.

And now I understand why Cebastian had become so interested in every minute detail of Baryn's investigation.

“You weren't checking on the show,” I say. “You were checking on us.”

“My dad started getting worse a couple years ago,” Ian says. “Forgetting shit. Getting confused. But somehow, out of everything, he remembered that fucking duffel bag. His old military bag. He decided he needed it back.” Ian gives a short, disbelieving laugh. “Seventeen years and nobody had found her, but he's convinced someone's going to stumble across the bag and trace it back to him. So he pays Nole to go get it. Nole loads the bag and everything with it into his trunk, and then the idiot gets into a fucking fender bender before he can get rid of any of it.”

It is almost impressive in its incompetence. Nole in a nutshell.

“And then everyone starts digging again.” His pacing becomes erratic, carrying him toward the door before he turns sharply back. “The cops. You. Then Baryn decides this is the fucking story of the century.”

Every update. Every demand for information. Every question Baryn probably dismissed as Cebastian being controlling because controlling Baryn's work is what Cebastian does.

For several seconds, Ian simply stands there, breathing too hard, and I wait for whatever comes next.

Nothing does.

That's when I realize he doesn't know either.

There is no bag packed by the door. No supplies beyond what was already here. No careful arrangement suggesting he'd prepared this place before bringing me to it. He hasn't taken my phone out to destroy it or asked who knew where I was. He hasn't searched me beyond whatever was necessary to bind my wrists and ankles.

There was no plan.

He saw me on the ridge, panicked, and hit me over the head.