Normal life.
Until her fingers brushed something stiff and crinkled at the bottom.
A thin foil wrapper.
Small enough to miss if you weren’t looking for secrets.
Sara pulled it free and turned it under the light.
A pregnancy test wrapper—sealed in the original evidence bag, untouched since intake.
The kind you buy when you can’t stand the waiting, when your whole future fits into a single line or a blank space.
Her stomach dropped.
Now the case wasn’t about shame.
It was about leverage.
If Lauren Pierce had suspected she might be pregnant?—
if she’d been carrying proof of Keller’s lie?—
then Keller wouldn’t just be a man who hurt her.
He’d be a man with something to lose.
Sara sealed the bag back up with slow, careful hands.
She wrote one sentence in her notebook, sharp and clean:
Lauren didn’t disappear because she was ashamed. She disappeared because she knew something.
Sara closed the box. Locked it back in place.
Sara’s Apartment — Later That Night
Sara pushed back from the table and stood, the chair legs scraping softly against the floor.
The apartment felt too quiet all at once. Not the good kind of quiet.
She walked to the large window that overlooked downtown Sylva—the glow of streetlights, the dark outlines of buildings, the empty stretch of road where everything looked normal.
But the hair along her arms lifted anyway.
A slow, crawling awareness slid over her skin.
Sara stared out into the night.
Nothing.
Just the town.
Just her reflection faint in the glass.
Still, she reached for the blinds and pulled them shut with one smooth motion.
The slats clicked into place.
