“You are wildly overestimating your appeal, Calloway.”
He fell into step beside her again.
“We don’t have to call it a date,” he said lightly. “Dinner. Public place. No scandal. No courtroom objection.”
She looked straight ahead.
“Still no.”
“Pity,” he said, that slow smile still in his voice. “I was starting to think I was making progress.”
As they reached the courthouse doors, April called from the clerk’s desk, “You two are exhausting.”
“I heard that,” Reid called back.
The Ambush
The heavy doors swung open.
Sound hit first—traffic, voices, the metallic hum of an amplifier. Sunlight spilled across the marble steps.
And cameras faced them.
Tripods. Boom mics. Phones lifted high.
A banner stretched between two stands:
VANISHED IN THE VALLEY
Eleanor stopped mid-step.
Reid stopped just behind her.
Deck muttered under his breath. “Ah, Christ.”
A poised woman in a fitted blazer turned toward them.
“Eleanor Harper?”
Eleanor did not move.
“I’m Lila Grant,”the woman said smoothly.“Host of Vanished in the Valley. We’re covering the recent disappearances here in Sylva.”
The name meant nothing.
The scale of the production, however, was terrifying.
Eleanor’s mind stuttered.
She had just spent the morning debating a fuel receipt and an eight-hundred-dollar envelope of cash.
There were no cameras for petty theft. There was no livestream for Mavis and her bridge club gossip.
So why was a national-grade podcast crew camped on the courthouse steps like they were waiting for a verdict at The Hague?
“You were present when one of the key witnesses was questioned,” Lila continued. “Do you think your role in that interview influenced the investigation?”
Her role?
