Everyone had hated him by then.
Lila, most of all.
She had followed him for weeks. Built theories. Pulled old girlfriends into interviews. Slowed down security footage until every glance looked sinister.
Eleanor Harper had defended him.
Lila had hated her, too.
The Ice Queen. The woman who smiled for cameras and got guilty men acquitted.
She opened the old folder on her desktop before she could stop herself.
CHARLESTON.
Video clips. Screenshots. Headlines.
A still frame of the husband outside the courthouse. Eyes shadowed. Mouth tight.
She stared at it.
For years, she'd seen guilt there.
Tonight, she saw something else.
A man being watched.
A man too exhausted to keep fighting a story someone else had already written for him.
The hollow feeling in her chest opened wider.
What if he hadn't done it either?
The thought hit hard enough to knock her back in the chair.
If David Mercer was innocent, maybe Charleston had been wrong, too.
And if Charleston had been wrong, then the foundation of her whole life cracked straight down the middle.
Maybe Eleanor Harper wasn't cold.
Maybe Eleanor Harper was the only person in the room willing to say, “I don’t know yet.”
Lila looked away from the screen so fast it almost hurt.
No.
No. She wasn't doing this.
She wasn't going to sit in a cheap hotel room in western North Carolina and unravel ten years of work because one witness broke on the stand.
Her phone buzzed hard against the desk.
KNOXVILLE.
Knox: Scanner traffic from UT campus. Girl missing. Last seen leaving Sigma Chi party. Boyfriend’s truck gone. We’re twenty minutes out. Call me.
Below it, another message.
