Page 36 of The Advocate’s Ultimatum

Sabre’s eyes dropped briefly to the file. “It wasn’t that simple,” she said. “It was a detention in the home with the case still open. I went to the house once and sent my investigator twice. I supported it.”

JP held her gaze. “How long?”

“Two weeks later, she was gone.”

Silence settled between them. JP glanced at the file again, then back at Sabre. “Would you make the same call today?”

Sabre gave it some thought. “I want to say no,” she said quietly. “But that’s not how it works. You don’t get hindsight in that courtroom. You get reports. You get compliance. You get a kid who wants to go home.” She paused. “And you make the best decision you can with what you have.”

JP gave a small nod. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the job.”

Sabre didn’t respond.

“What do we know about her disappearance?”

Sabre flipped the page. “The mother reported her missing when she didn’t come home from school.”

“What about Hannah’s father?”

“He wasn’t really involved. If I remember right, he was in jail at the time.”

“Was anyone else in the home?”

Sabre scanned. “We later discovered that the mother’s boyfriend was there a lot, and August, of course.”

She turned another page. “The initial search was fast,” she said. “Neighborhood canvass, school interviews. The police focused on Hayes early on.”

“Why?”

Sabre tapped a section. “He made inconsistent statements, his timeline didn’t hold, and he wasn’t supposed to be in the home at all.”

JP leaned closer. “Was that enough to charge him?”

“Not at first,” Sabre said. “They built the case over time.”

“On what?”

“It was all circumstantial. There was no body and no direct evidence.”

“But they still got a conviction?”

“Yes.”

On the next few pages there were photos of Hannah, her school picture, some with her mom. In all, Hannah was smiling, bright, open, unaware. She looked impossibly small. In one of the photos, she wore a faded yellow T-shirt with a tiny, embroidered butterfly near the collar and denim overalls that hung a little loose on her thin frame. Her shoulder-length blonde hair had been cut unevenly, as if someone had done it at home with kitchen scissors, and a stubborn cowlick that refused to lie flat above her right eyebrow.

She had large blue eyes that seemed almost too serious for a child her age. Even in the photograph, they held a quiet watchfulness, as though she were trying very hard to understand the adults around her. A scattering of freckles crossed the bridge of her nose, and one of her front teeth was missing, leaving a gap that should have made her smile look carefree. Instead, it looked tentative.

Sabre paused. After a moment, she turned another page. She found interview summaries, witness statements, and fragments of a story that had once felt complete, but now it didn’t.

JP touched her arm. “What’s bothering you?”

“They moved too fast on Hayes,” she said.

JP frowned. “Fast doesn’t mean wrong.”

“No, but it can mean incomplete,” she countered. “They locked onto him early, and everything after that lined up behind it.”

JP nodded. “Confirmation bias.”