And for the first time in a long time, Reid Calloway dreaded the morning—not because of the case, but because of the person he’d have to pretend he didn’t love across the aisle.
52
Jackson County Superior Court
Later That Week
The next two days of trial blurred into a steady march of witnesses.
Lila’s newest episode had gone up before lunch.
“District Attorney Reid Calloway has always kept his private life private,” she said in that bright, hungry voice of hers. “But sources describe a pattern: polished, charming, intensely private—and never alone for long. So why did defense attorney Eleanor Harper become the one relationship worth risking a murder trial for?”
Eleanor had shut it off after that.
A former coworker of Caroline’s testified about the last weeks before she vanished—how Caroline had kept a packed box under her desk and a Knoxville rental listing open in a browser tab, how she’d said more than once, “If he doesn’t calm down, I’m gone.”
Caroline’s father took the stand for less than twenty minutes. He spoke quietly about his daughter’s laugh, about the way she’d read Davie to sleep over the phone when he spentweekends at the farm, about the voicemail she’d left the night she disappeared—a message he’d played until the file finally corrupted and died.
He never once looked at David.
A technology analyst followed, walking the jury through old phone records and cell tower maps. Dots and lines. Late-night calls that pinged briefly off a tower near Riverbend and then went dark.
Enough to suggest. Not enough to prove. Not yet.
Piece by piece, Reid laid the story out again—not as rumor this time, but as testimony: a custody battle gone toxic, a woman who disappeared into the dark, a construction site that, eight years later, had finally given up its secret.
Eleanor did what she always did.
She stood when it was her turn, one witness after another, and picked at seams.
She nodded gently to Caroline’s father and kept her questions to a minimum—dates, times, the limits of what he actually knew versus what he feared. She pressed the analyst on the range of old towers, on how many phones might have hit that same sector on that same night.
She never raised her voice. Never looked at the gallery. And she almost never looked across the aisle.
By Thursday afternoon, the rhythm had become so familiar that the change caught her off guard.
Reid rose as the latest witness stepped down.
“Your Honor,” he said, “the State has no further witnesses at this time.”
He glanced at his neatly stacked files, then back up at the bench.
“The State rests.”
The words landed with quiet finality.
As Reid sat, she saw the slight, involuntary drop of his shoulders.
He looked exhausted.
Not just from the trial. From the cameras. The headlines. The strain of holding a murder case together while the press picked apart his personal life one ugly inch at a time.
The weight of it pressed against her ribs.
To save him, she had to tear apart the case he had just spent days building.
Every file she opened felt like a betrayal of the man six feet away.
