Eleanor set the phone face down on the nightstand and lay back against the pillows.
Tomorrow she would drive back to Sylva.
Running had once saved her.
As she closed her eyes, she realized with a cold, terrifying certainty that she was out of places to run.
62
Lila Grant Tuesday Morning — The Sylva Inn
The room looked wrong without the whiteboards.
For weeks, every wall had been covered in timelines, maps, and photographs, connected by thick black marker. David Mercer in the center. Caroline Simms in the corner. Arrows. Dates. Motive. Opportunity. A whole life reduced to a shape she could point to and say: There. Him.
Now the whiteboards leaned facedown against the wall beside the dresser.
The desk was bare except for her laptop and a half-empty cup of hotel coffee gone cold hours ago.
Lila sat in the dark with the television off and the curtains half open to the mountains beyond the parking lot. Sylva glittered below her in scattered lights.
On the laptop screen, the courthouse clip was paused.
Danny Mercer’s face.
Not David’s.
Danny standing in the witness box, pale and sweating beneath the courtroom lights, eyes fixed somewhere over the jury’s heads as if he couldn’t bear to look at anyone.
“My brother didn’t kill her,” he said.
Lila hit play.
“My brother didn’t kill her. I did.”
The words filled the quiet room.
She stared at the screen. Then she dragged the cursor back and played it again.
And again.
The third time, she muted it.
Three years of telling herself that she knew how to see things other people missed. That police departments got lazy. That prosecutors got tunnel vision. That lawyers like Eleanor Harper twisted the truth into something juries could live with.
Two million followers because she knew how to spot the monster. She had built a whole life on certainty.
Except David Mercer had looked at her in the courthouse hallway that morning with the same expression he'd worn every other time she'd shoved a microphone in his face.
Tired and cornered and furious in the way innocent people sometimes were when no one would stop calling them guilty.
Lila closed her eyes.
For one sharp, awful second, she saw another face.
Charleston.
A humid courthouse. Satellite trucks lined up along the curb. The husband standing on the courthouse steps while she talked over the footage for her livestream.
