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Marj shakes her head as she heads for the door. “Poor dog survives all this just to end up with you two.”

Faun abandons me immediately and follows her.

“Traitor,” I call after him.

Marj opens the door. “He knows where the pie is.”

I spread the photographs across the bed in front of me, sorting through them without any particular order. Most are from high school, their glossy edges softened from years of being handled and shoved into boxes. Casey and Mara making faces at the camera from opposite ends of a diner booth. The three of us sitting on the hood of someone's car with gas-station drinks between us. In another, she's laughing at something outside the frame, one hand raised like she was trying to stop whoever held the camera from taking the picture. There are people whose names take me a second to place and clothes I would prefer never to acknowledge wearing, but Casey is immediately recognizable in every one. Red hair, freckles, always leaning into whoever happened to be beside her.

Mara told me before she left that the identification is official now. Casey's family has been notified, and once the state finishes what it needs from her, they'll finally be able to bring her home. I don't know what happens after that, whether they'll bury her here or take her somewhere else, and for once, I don't feel an immediate need to find out.

I pick up another photograph.

Eventually, there will be somewhere to put her.

The thought hurts differently than I expect.

“What’s your plan for the podcast?” I ask.

Baryn looks up from his phone. “What?”

“The podcast.” I raise an eyebrow at him. “You know—the entire reason you’re here?”

His expression changes slightly. “I'm not releasing it.”

I stare at him. “At all?”

“Not yet.”

“You have the biggest story of your career,” I say.

“Probably.”

“Your executive producer murdered the subject of your investigation.”

“Technically, my former executive producer.”

I give him a flat look.

“Sorry,” he says. “Continue.”

“You could release something tomorrow and half the internet would know your name by Friday.”

“Half the internet already knows my name.” He exhales and looks toward the window. “Yeah. I know what I have.”

This isn't what I expected at all. “Why wait?”

He leans forward, resting his forearms against his knees. “The cops need time to do their jobs. Her family needs to get her back. They need to decide what they're comfortable having out there, and you need more than twenty-four hours between being kidnapped by my executive producer and hearing an ad for meal kits in the middle of an episode about it.”

Despite myself, I laugh. “That would be sincerely poor placement.”

“Thank you.” His mouth twitches before his expression settles again. “Eventually, yeah. I want to tell the story. I think it matters. What happened to her matters, and what happened afterward matters too. But I've spent enough time in the middle of this shit to know that having the means to tell something doesn't mean you have to tell it first.”

There is a version of Baryn I constructed before I knew him, assembled almost entirely from assumptions about his profession. Someone who arrived in Stillwater because a dead girl made good content. Someone who could take the worst thing that had ever happened to us, divide it into episodes, put music beneath it, and call the result a story.

I wasn't entirely wrong about the industry.

But I was wrong about him.