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“You okay?” he asks, his eyes tracking my internal reconfiguration.

“Fine,” I say, the word coming out a pitch too high.

He hums. He doesn't believe me, but he’s polite enough not to call the bluff. He pulls out of the lot, and I fix my gaze on the dashboard.

I check in with my stomach. Normal.

I check in again ten seconds later. Still normal.

The trees blur past in dark green streaks. The silence between us is a living thing, waiting to be categorized.

“So,” he says eventually, one hand loose on the wheel. “Do you ever listen to Casket Case?”

I don’t look at him. “I do not.”

He makes a sound that’s almost a laugh—a dry, knowing huff. Translation: Nice try.

“As a professional curiosity,” I admit. “I may have listened once or twice.”

“Sure.”

“Honest,” I insist. “I do not generally participate in the consumption or promotion of true crime. Today was an outlier. A decision made almost entirely on emotion, which is both out of character and not a precedent I intend to establish.”

He nods, listening, but there’s something in his expression that says he’s waiting for me to finish.

“Forensic work isn’t about narrative,” I add. “It’s about data. Patterns. What can actually be measured.”

“And yet,” he says, “people don’t listen to data. They listen to stories.”

I frown. “People shouldn’t be making conclusions based on what’s most compelling to listen to.”

“They already are,” he says. “The question is whether the story they’re hearing is accurate.”

“It rarely is,” I say flatly.

He smiles slightly. “You say that like I’m out here making things up.”

“I’m saying that storytelling introduces bias,” I reply. “Framing. Selective emphasis. You choose what to include, what to leave out⁠—”

“So do you,” he cuts in.

I frown. “No, I⁠—”

“You prioritize findings,” he says. “You decide what matters. What gets documented first. What gets explained in detail and what gets relegated to a footnote. You’re a narrator, too. You just use a set of sliding calipers instead of a microphone.”

It’s not that I don’t see the potential value in what Baryn does. I do.

Narrative is what allows people to engage with violence at a distance. To observe it. To categorize it. To learn from it without being directly involved.

The dead have stories that deserve to be heard—to teach, to indict the living, and to force the world to look at the mess it left behind.

The unfortunate part is that the general population doesn't understand how these cases actually unfold—how long they take, how often they stall, how much depends on small, physical details.

They don’t see the full process. Just the outcome.

Who gets prioritized. Who doesn’t.

Young. White. Female.