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Men unlikely to rearrange anything important.

Baryn is none of those things.

He’s currently listening to Simon explain something about the recorder, one hand wrapped around his coffee. He lifts it to his mouth, takes a sip, then runs his thumb absently over the corner of his lower lip.

My sinoatrial node responds with an immediate and entirely disproportionate increase in output.

I look away.

There is no physiological justification for that.

More concerningly, there is no professional justification for what I’m about to do.

In approximately five minutes, I am going to sit across from this man, put on a pair of headphones, and allow him to ask me questions about Casey while a microphone records every answer.

I agreed to this voluntarily.

That fact becomes more alarming the longer I examine it.

Because Baryn is not safe. He asks questions for a living. He notices hesitation. He follows inconsistencies. He makes his career finding the thing someone would rather leave buried.

And there are things I have spent seventeen years carefully not excavating.

The sixteen-year-old girl who was certain that if she collected enough facts, someone would listen. The part of me that still goes back through those last days looking for the moment I should have understood what was happening. The possibility that forensic anthropology was never simply an academic interest, no matter how many times I’ve told myself otherwise.

Most of all, the question I refuse to examine because I already know there is no scientifically defensible answer:

Whether Casey would still be alive if I had done something differently.

And I have just given him permission to start digging.

EP. 78 (Transcript): Casey Whitmore Was Here

Guest: Dr. Serena Harper, Forensic Anthropologist

[Portions of this interview have been edited or withheld at the request of the ongoing investigation.]

BARYN:

Before we start, I want to make something clear. Dr. Harper is currently consulting on the remains recovered in Stillwater. There are things she knows that she cannot tell me, and things I know better than to ask her.

SERENA:

That last part remains to be seen.

BARYN:

I am capable of professional restraint.

SERENA:

Is Simon making a face right now?

[pause]

BARYN:

That is not relevant to the interview.