He ended the call without another word, letting the phone fall into his lap.
Brad glanced over. “You good?”
Alex didn’t look at him. “No,” he muttered. “But I will be.”
Outside, the trees blurred into each other as the car picked up speed, the hum of the engine filling the silence. Inside, his pulse ticked like a fuse burning down. Whatever she was keeping from him, he was done waiting to be let in. No more silence. No more edits. It was time for the truth. All of it.
The cold settledin around Charlotte like a second skin. She sat alone on the stone bench outside the conference center, arms wrapped around herself, watching her breath drift into the dark. The area was quiet now—almost everyone gone, lights low, the hum of the streetlamps the only sound.
Then headlights. A state police car pulled up slowly to the curb. Brad was driving. Alex sat in the passenger seat, barely moving. The car rolled to a stop.
Charlotte stood, brushing her hands down the sides of her coat, heart already in her throat. Brad leaned over and said something to Alex. Alex nodded but didn’t look at him.
Charlotte watched Brad pull away, the tires crunching over the gravel as he turned out of the lot. He was giving them space. Or giving Alex space.
Alex walked up slowly, his face unreadable in the low light. He didn’t say anything at first. Just looked at her. Then, “You’re cold.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” he replied, already taking off his coat and draping it over her shoulders.
She let him.
“Come on.” He nodded toward the building. “Inside.”
They walked in silence through the side entrance, past the dimly lit halls where, earlier that day, the full task force had been scrambling, arguing, printing case files and pinning evidence to cork boards. Now it was quiet. Only a skeleton crew present. Echoes of movement still hung in the halls.
Alex opened the door to one of the unused rooms they’d been working from. She walked in, folding her arms beneath his coat. He closed the door behind them. The overhead lights were off, just the faint glow of a monitor screen casting blue over the table where they'd once mapped timelines and chased paths.
Charlotte turned to him, her voice low. “You’re angry.”
“I’m past angry,” Alex said. “I found out from a prison doctor that you visited Gideon Ward multiple times during his sentence. Another thing you never told me.”
She opened her mouth, but he held up a hand.
“Don’t lie to me, Charlotte. Not now.”
Her silence wasn’t defensive—it was tired. Heavy. “I didn’t know how to tell you,” she said finally. “And after a while, I didn’t want to see how you’d look at me when I did.”
“You trusted him,” Alex said, the edge in his voice sharper now. “More than me?”
“No,” she stepped forward, “not more. Just… differently. He understood something I couldn’t explain to anyone else. Not even you.”
“He knew about Chuck,” Alex said. “Four years after he was locked up. You told him. You went to him.”
“I did,” Charlotte said. “And I’m not proud of it.”
Alex’s hands were clenched at his sides. “Then tell me the truth now,” he said. “Why?”
Charlotte met his eyes. “Because I thought Gideon Ward was the only person who knew what it was like to lose everything… and still keep breathing.”
Silence pressed between them like weights on a bar.
“And Elias?” Alex asked, voice low.
She hesitated.
“Did you know about Elias?”
