“Got it.”
David straightened and looked across the jobsite.
Framing crews worked steadily, compressors humming, trucks idling along the gravel access road. The smell of fresh-cut lumber hung in the warm afternoon air.
He’d built everything he had on days like this. Concrete and lumber and clean lines. Things you could point to when people whispered. Then he noticed the quiet.
Two workers stood near the equipment trailer.
Not working. Just watching him.
One of them held a phone.
David frowned.
“What?”
The younger man shifted uneasily.
“You seen this?”
He turned the phone around.
A video was playing.
A woman’s voice came through the tiny speaker.
“Eight years ago, a young mother named Caroline Simms vanished outside the quiet mountain town of Sylva…”
David’s stomach tightened.
He took the phone.
A studio microphone filled the screen.
Then a photograph appeared.
Caroline. Young. Laughing. Holding their son on one hip, his small hand reaching for the camera.
He hadn’t seen that picture in years, but his chest clenched the same way it had the first time he saw it.
David handed the phone back.
“Where’d that come from?”
“Podcast,” the worker said. “Vanished in the Valley. And now some other one. It’s all over the internet.”
Of course it was. One big show took a bite, and every hungry copycat in range showed up to see what was left.
David walked toward his truck.
He’d heard the rumors before.
He’d lived with them.
Gravel crunched behind him.
He turned.
