Just another face in a crowd full of faces.
A woman with tired eyes and a soft voice pressed a cup of coffee into his hand.
“Here, honey,” she said. “You look half-frozen.”
He gave her the kind of smile men like him were good at—small, grateful, harmless.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
Around him, Sylva held its breath.
But he could feel it moving through—fear passing hand to hand, quiet and contagious.
A town knew its own rhythms. And it knew when a predator had stepped into the woods.
The radios crackled. The sheriff’s voice carried across the closed highway, calm and controlled, like he could command the mountain itself if he spoke with enough authority.
Sheriff Burke Scott.
A good man. Trusted. Steady. The kind who believed in promises.
Burke had taken the badge from his father’s hands and stood on the courthouse steps with cameras and handshakes and half the town watching. He’d made one vow that stuck.
He was going to reopen the cold cases. All of them. Not the easy ones—the ones families still cried over in church pews, the ones the mountain had kept.
He’d promised closure. Promised answers. And Sylva—sweet, loyal Sylva—had believed him.
He heard it the way he heard most things.
Not from a press release. Not from an official briefing.
From people who couldn’t keep their voices down at the diner. From men talking near gas pumps. From a woman in line at the pharmacy, shaking her head and saying, “Bless Burke… he’s gonna stir up ghosts.”
Ghosts.
That word had made something in him go still.
Then he heard the name.
Lauren Pierce.
The first file Burke planned to pull. The first family he planned to give peace to.
The second that name reached him, the world sharpened.
Not slowly. Not gently.
It snapped into focus like a lens turning clean.
Because Lauren Pierce wasn’t just a cold case.
She was unfinished.
Sylva had tried to bury it under time and weather and prayer.
He’d thought it ended with her. He’d thought the mountain had swallowed the last page.
But Burke Scott—straight-arrow sheriff—had just put his hand on the cover and opened it again.
