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His words cause me to blurt out, “We found some tapes.”

There is a brief pause. “What kind of tapes?”

“Home videos. Casey’s.” I don’t know why, but telling him this leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. This feels like our thing, mine and Serena’s. Involving someone like Cebastian, even sharing it with him… I already wish I hadn’t.

“And you were planning to mention this when?”

“When I had something to tell you beyond ‘we found some tapes.’ We’re still going through them.”

“Okay.” His tone hesitantly shifts into something more agreeable. “That’s progress. Send me what you’ve got before you build an episode around it. What’s on the tapes, what you’re looking for. I’d like to know what we’re working with before we promise the audience anything, but we can definitely use something like this to make them feel involved.”

“I am not teasing a breakthrough before we know whether there is one.”

“You don’t need a breakthrough, you just need content.”

“And if there’s something on those tapes that matters, I’d prefer to understand it before I announce it to everyone with an internet connection.”

He exhales. “You understand I can’t keep funding weeks of you watching home movies.”

I press my thumb into the corner of one eye. “If you wanted a quick and tidy ending, you shouldn’t have greenlit a case with an almost twenty-year cold trail. I’ll ask the killer to be more mindful of our production schedule next time. Better yet, maybe next season we can investigate something more accommodating. Tax fraud. A missing Labradoodle.”

He laughs once, more warning than amusement. “You’re impossible, Mayfair. You know that?”

“Frequently told, never convinced.”

“Fine. Put it this way: you're funded through next Friday. After that, I need an episode—not another excuse.”

He hangs up before I can say anything else.

I let the phone hang limp in my hand, then place it facedown on a stack of notebooks on the nightstand.

I walk to the tiny kitchenette. Cold bites its way into the soles of my feet as I drop a coffee pod into the single-serve brewer. While the machine sputters to life, I stare at my reflection in the microwave door.

I look like someone who lost a fight with a wood chipper. There’s a smudge on my glasses. My hair is standing up on one side, the result of Serena grabbing a handful of it at some point in the very recent past. I’m not sure whether to be disappointed in myself or weirdly proud.

Three years is a long time to wonder how breaking a celibacy streak is eventually going to feel. I’d imagined regret. Relief. Maybe some profound post-nut clarity where the universe rearranged itself and I discovered something deeply inconvenient about who I am.

Instead, I feel exactly like myself. Just happier. There should probably be something alarming about that. Mostly, I just keep thinking about the fact that she wanted me at all. And sometime last night, somewhere between her saying my name while I fucked her into the mattress and falling asleep against me, wanting her stopped feeling nearly as dangerous as the possibility that this might actually mean something to me.

When the coffee is ready, I lean against the counter with the mug warming my hands.

Serena stirs, the sheets whispering against themselves. I half-hope she’ll fully wake and rescue me from myself, but she stays put.

Cebastian wants proof the investigation is moving forward.

What’s worse is that he’s partially right.

I have an episode sitting in the can, but that doesn’t change the fact that the investigation has stalled. I can’t keep circling the same handful of questions and calling it progress just because I know how to make it sound good into a microphone.

Sooner or later, I have to find something new.

Not for Cebastian. Not even for the show.

For Casey.

I’ve spent years resurrecting the silences left by other people’s dead, reconstructing their lives from police reports and public records and the memories of strangers. But I’ve never felt the responsibility like this before—not the dread, the obligation to a specific lost girl who never asked to become anyone’s mystery.

It physically hurts to imagine spinning Casey into another episode for the churn, especially when the best I can offer is maybe.