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Maybe we’re getting closer. Maybe the town is still hiding something.

My eyes fall on Serena again. I feel like I’m letting her down too.

I start making lists in my head. Every dead end. Every contradiction. Every question we've answered only to uncover two more beneath it. I map it out like I always do, tracing each line back to the empty space at the center of the story.

I almost want to call Cebastian and tell him he’s wrong about everything. But then I remember he’s only wrong about almost everything. He’s right about one thing: you can’t wait for the spark to start a fire. Sometimes you just have to burn the whole thing down.

My eyes flick over to the corner where the box of MiniDV tapes sits.

We’ve been looking at the evidence, but we haven’t been looking at it with fresh eyes.

I take a sip of the coffee—burn my tongue a little, just enough to know I’m still alive—and walk over to the tapes.

I set the stack on the tiny dining table, next to the battered legal pad Serena left out the night before. Some of the words are faintly indented where she pressed too hard, leaving perfectly aligned micro-scars in the paper.

I think about how she’s the only person who’s ever looked at me and seen someone worth trusting. Not a project. Not a voice. Not a click-farm. Not money. Just a person.

And I think about Casey. What Casey meant to her.

I run my thumb along the spines of the tapes.

If I’m going to tell her story, it has to be right, not just clickable. I have to get it right, or I don’t want to do it at all.

I slide a tape into the adapter and push it into the ancient VCR. It whirs to life, and a faint, now familiar voice—so alive, so fucking ordinary—fills the room.

I stare at the low-res flicker of the TV, fully ready to hear a teenage girl talk about weather or homework or the absolute inhumanity of her AP English teacher.

On screen, Casey looks painfully young. Fifteen or sixteen, all freckles and bright red hair, with a smile so big it takes over her entire face. She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor in a room lit by cheap string lights, wearing a tank top over another tank top and enough plastic bracelets to date the footage within a five-year window. Every few seconds, she reaches toward the camera to adjust something, sending the picture sideways and making me vaguely seasick.

There’s nothing remarkable about her. That might be the worst part. She looks like every other bored high school kid with access to a camcorder and nowhere particularly important to be. She laughs at something offscreen, loud and completely unselfconscious. It's almost impossible to reconcile this girl with the one I’ve spent years researching.

Casey Whitmore has existed in my head as a collection of facts for so long that seeing her like this feels strangely invasive.

She isn’t missing here.

She’s just a kid.

The camera swings toward Serena, her hair whipping across her face as she falls backward laughing at something Casey says. She grins without restraint, all loose limbs and sunburned cheeks, looking so light it almost hurts to watch. I've spent the last week getting to know the woman she became. This is Serena before the world took a hammer to both their lives, and there’s something so disorienting about meeting a version of her who doesn’t know it’s coming.

I let the moment linger exactly one heartbeat longer than I should, then force myself to remember why I’m watching in the first place.

I reach for the yellow legal pad and jot down a few details, but I know right away that these aren’t the moments that will get airtime.

This is just... life. Intact. Messy. In progress.

I must zone out, because when I blink, Serena is sitting up in bed. She’s still facing the wall, but the movement is controlled and unhurried, like she’s checking that all her limbs still work before turning to the rest of the world.

She doesn’t speak for a long minute. She just sits there, arms wrapped around her knees, watching the pastel dawn smear itself across the window.

Finally, she says, “Who was on the phone?”

I look over, briefly tempted to invent an answer. “My executive producer,” I say. “He wants an episode. The world’s hungriest man would like a meal.”

She grunts—a nonverbal of course he does—and swings her legs over the side of the bed. She stands, walks over to the table, and downs the rest of my coffee.

Serena considers things most people wouldn’t think twice about. The fact that drinking from my cup doesn’t require any consideration—I like what that implies more than I have any business liking it.

She sets the mug down and looks at me. “You’re thinking about quitting,” she assesses.