He pushed off the wall and studied her face the way only someone who had known her too long could.
“Go where you can hear yourself think,” he said. “Then come back.”
The simplicity of it nearly broke her.
She nodded once.
As Deck turned her toward the stairwell, Lila’s voice carried faintly down the hall from the main corridor, still trying to claw its way through the chaos.
“Eleanor!”
Eleanor stopped.
For a heartbeat.
Then she turned her head enough to see Lila’s outline at the far end of the hall, framed in camera light.
“You might start by considering,” she said quietly, “that sometimes the man you’ve been hounding isn’t the one who did it. Not this time. Maybe not before.”
For the first time since Eleanor had ever seen her on a screen, Lila didn’t seem to have a follow-up ready.
Her hand tightened on the mic, her face gone blank in a way that looked too much like doubt to be comfortable.
Deck reached into his pocket, pulled out her keys—he’d apparently grabbed them off counsel table when she wasn’t looking—and dropped them into her hand.
“Side lot,” he said. “Take the back road out unless you want three microphones and a drone following ye.”
That earned the ghost of a smile.
“Deck…” Her voice broke a little on his name.
He squeezed her shoulder once.
“Go, lass,” he said softly. “Call me when ye get where ye’re going.”
She nodded once.
Then she went.
61
Harper House — Monday Evening
By the time she crossed the county line, the mountains had already begun to feel far away.
She left Sylva without going home. She turned east.
The drive passed in fragments.
The radio off. Her phone buzzed twice in the console, then fell still.
By the time she turned onto her parents’ street south of Broad, Charleston had gone hushed and lamplit.
Her parents’ house sat back from the sidewalk behind an iron gate and a narrow brick walk lined with clipped hedges and camellias. Tall windows. Double piazzas.
She parked at the curb instead of pulling through the gate.
She had texted.
