Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Evelyn
The riot looks better in slow motion. That’s the first thing I hate about myself today.
On my screen, Shae goes down like a felled saint—white prison uniform smeared with a sacrificial kind of red.
The handheld shakes for three beats, then steadies at a brave-documentarian angle we’ll pretend happened by accident.
I already know the sound bed I’ll want: the high fluorescent hum we captured in the chow hall, pitched low and layered under a single piano note that never resolves.
Blake leans in my doorway and watches me watch her. “You’re doing the thing,” he says.
“What thing?” I keep scrubbing back and forth along the timeline, looking for the frame where sympathy overtakes skepticism. There’s always a frame.
“The baptism.” He drifts into the makeshift edit bay and drops into the extra chair, knees out, unbothered on purpose. “You wash her in tragedy and tell the audience it’s holy.”
“Good morning to you too.” I trim three frames off a guard’s elbow, and the whole hallway becomes choreography. “If I’m baptizing anyone, it’s the viewers. They need absolution for wanting this much spectacle.”
“Blessed are the complicit,” he murmurs.
I mark the place where Shae’s head hits the cinder block and the camera jerks. That tremor is worth ten interviews.
“Angle B,” I say.
He slides his thumb drive across the console. “C.O. body cam. Ridge unlocked it for us.”
The screen fills with the world as seen from a chest: hysteria in fisheye, scuffling feet, an officer’s breath as he runs. Shae comes into view farther down the corridor, already small, already chosen.
I lay the body-cam under our main. The cheap mic gives me a grain that feels like truth. The grain lies, but it lies convincingly.
“You’re going to hell,” Blake says, like he’s calling the weather.
“I can take notes there,” I say. “Play it from the top.”
We run the sequence. Sirens in their tinny key. An inmate shoves another into a doorjamb; a guard overcorrects, baton raised; a tray shatters—then, in the mess, Shae turns her head perfectly to camera, a slick of blood painting her cheekbone like stigmata.
“Pause,” I say.
Blake’s finger hovers. “You want the tear.”
“Of course I want the tear.” I feather the keyframes and give it two fewer milliseconds than my gut begs for. Leave the audience the hunger of almost.
“You know these choices are why they call you the butcher,” he says, neutral. “You go through truth like a deli slicer.”
“Better a butcher than a taxidermist,” I say. “I don’t stuff dead moments and pretend they’re alive.” I point at the waveform. “Listen to the second scream. Not the first—the second. That one isn’t performance.”
He leans closer. The scream catches and tears at the end. A throat that didn’t plan to open. He nods despite himself. Little victory.
“Okay,” he says. “What about the blood? We have the nurse stating later that most of it’s superficial.”
“We don’t lie about it,” I say. “We let the audience do it for us.” I drag in the nurse interview and place the line three scenes after the riot, over a shot of Shae’s hand—knuckles butterfly-taped, nails clean. “They’ll hear ‘superficial’ and translate it to ‘unjust.’ We won’t help them.”
“Hard to help people who want to be fooled,” he says.
“Exactly,” I answer, and hate myself a tiny bit less because precision feels moral even when it isn’t.
Blake swivels to the second monitor where my charity-day assembly waits: blowzy daytime-TV color, Shae in a soft pink cardigan—the shade of forgiveness. I keep the riot and the pantry work side by side on purpose; redemption edits better if you strobe the sin.
“Wondering where to drop Lila?” he asks, too casual.
“I’m wondering what I can legally show of Lila,” I say. Not the same thing.
On the drive are two hours of her being useful in a way assistants never are: anticipating, soft-voiced, everywhere and nowhere. On another, shorter folder, there’s the thing nobody paid for.
“Start with the clean,” he suggests, dragging in B-roll: Lila with a clipboard at Hearth & Hands, hair in a neat knot, eyes up for cues. Our boom catches her whisper through logistics. “We can move the soup line there, move the bake sale table back a foot for foot traffic.”
“Make her look capable,” I say. “Then make her look adored.”
We find the shot: Lila laughing at something Shae says off-camera—not the way you laugh at a joke, but the way you laugh when you’re memorizing someone’s face. It’s beautiful and damning. I dip it in honey and lay it between two scenes of Shae hugging volunteers.
“Lower third?” Blake asks.
“If I put ‘Assistant,’ she disappears,” I say. “If I put ‘Confidante,’ I’m writing us into a lawsuit.”
“So call her by her name and let the camera do the libel,” he says, not entirely joking.
“‘Lila—Operations,’” I decide. Operations can mean anything.
He taps the keyboard. “And the other clip?” he asks—meaning the one from the office where Lila wasn’t wearing a mic and the GoPro on the shelf was supposed to be off.
“We’ll decide if we need sin later,” I say. “For now, we do Sunday School.”
We cut Shae’s pantry work like liturgy. She does intake. Stacks cans. Pours soup with the concentration of a surgeon and the grace of a baptismal mother. I balance the pretty with something feral: the refrigerator hum, a mosquito of sound riding under every shot until your skull knows we’re lying.
“More hum,” I say.
Blake gives me more hum.
When our saint is sanctified, I do something I shouldn’t: I slide in one full second of black between baton and blood.
Two frames is a blink. One second is a thought.
In that thought, the audience will imagine what we don’t show.
They’ll build their own monster. It’s cleaner when people do your dirty work for you.
Blake says nothing, which is how I know he saw it.
“Okay,” he says finally. “Structure. Open with her voiceover—‘You’d be amazed what a warm meal does’—over riot footage, then smash to the pantry line. Irony without saying ‘irony.’”
“Too glib,” I say. “We open on the pantry and earn the riot. Otherwise we’re rubbernecking.”
“You built a slow-motion halo and now you want restraint?” He grins.
“I want the chance to say we were restrained.”
His grin fades. “Legal flagged the Declan material,” he says—meaning the body-cam and the fog around how we got it. “Use it sparingly.”
“I use everything sparingly,” I say, and we both stare at the wall where Emmy plaques the color of ego catch the morning light and throw it around.
I drop in a micro-shot: Declan’s boot nudging a dropped spoon out of the fray so no one slips. It’s nothing. It’s everything. It makes him human.
Humans are so much easier to indict.
Blake clears his throat. “Evelyn—Lila wants to stop by.”
“What for?”
“Says she has ‘context.’ Your favorite word.”
I go still. “Did you give her an appointment?”
“She’s in the lobby,” he says.
I exhale. “Send her in.”
Blake slips out. A moment later, Lila enters a little too careful, a little too pleased to be helpful. She holds a manila folder in both hands like a devotional.
“Ms. Cross,” she says. “I brought you those releases you requested for the bake sale minors.” Her voice is pitched to sound reliable and replaceable at the same time.
“You emailed those already,” I remind her.
“These are originals.” She steps forward and sets the folder beside my keyboard—but doesn’t let go. “There were… additions.”
I look at her face before I look at the forms and see what Blake wanted me to see: the desire to be believed, which is cousin to the desire to matter.
“Additions,” I echo.
“Statements.” She finally releases the folder. “Clarifying timelines. There’s been… talk.” Her eyes flick to the paused riot footage with polite nausea. “I wanted to make sure Hearth & Hands isn’t painted as chaotic.”
“It won’t be,” I say. “We make order out of chaos for a living.” I open the folder.
On top are exactly what she promised: three parental releases with fresh ink—and a fourth page stapled to each set. Supplemental Statement. The language reads like it was drafted by someone who binge-watches courtroom shows.
I, [name], saw Ms. Halston arrive at 9:05 a.m.—time-stamped to the minute. Too exact. Too useful.
“Did you write these?” I ask, without heat.
“I assisted,” she says. “People want to be helpful. They don’t always have the words. I gave them the words.”
Her eyes shine. Too eager. I don’t trust it.
“And this is because…?” I prompt.
“Because Shae deserves accuracy,” she answers, simple as a hymn. “And because you deserve to tell it right.”
Right is a flexible word. I keep my voice flat. “We’ll always take accuracy.”
Her gaze drifts to the body-cam angle, to the line where Declan’s POV sways. “Will he be in it? The officer?”
“He’s a perspective,” I say. “Not a character.”
Lila nods like she knows what that means. Maybe she does. She’s better at performance than the others—better than most producers I know, which is a fact I don’t enjoy acknowledging.
“Anything else?” I ask. Meaning: what do you want.
She clears her throat. “I know you’ll get… requests. For access. After the gala in a few weeks.” Her tone stays soft, but the offer is sharp. “It might help if they came through me. Less noise.”
Blake, back in the small living area, leans against the wall pretending not to listen. He makes a faint sound like a laugh swallowed badly. Lila doesn’t look over.
“Noted,” I tell her. “Leave your number on the folder.”
Her smile widens by one degree. “Of course,” she says, and glides out.
When she’s gone, Blake steps back in. “She’s dangerous.”
“Everyone in this project is dangerous,” I say. “She’s just polite about it.”
He eyes the supplemental statements. “They’re insurance. For Shae. For us.”
“They’re choreography,” I say.
We go back to the cut.
I punch in on Shae with a donor—just enough to catch the micro-pause before she says the woman’s name. It’s a rehearsal pause: searching the air behind the person for their lower third.
“Leave it,” Blake says when I don’t move past. “It’s more honest.”
“We’ll get notes,” I say. “‘Make her perfect.’”
“Let them.” His voice is too calm. He’s right. There’s a point where integrity becomes a kink.
And then, because the day has a sense of humor, my phone vibrates with a text from Georgina:
Evelyn—We adore the riot. The pantry sings. Can you end the act on a laugh? Shae’s laugh is so unnerving.
A heart emoji. An axe emoji. I swear to God.
I type: Copy. We’ll explore options.
Then I scroll for Shae’s laugh.
We’ve cataloged them. Tiny unforced snorts that sell girl next door. Huskier versions for woman who survived. A bright bark that says media trained. I choose the smallest—an exhale that barely counts.
If you listen closely, it sounds like steam escaping the crack of a lid you put on too tight.
“Saint Shae steaming,” Blake quips.
“Close the pun store,” I say. “We’re not insured for that.”
He grins. “You like her.”
“I like a challenge,” I say.
“Right,” he says.
By sunset, the timeline is a living thing. Our saint bleeds, serves, smiles, almost cracks.
“Export?” Blake asks, hovering above the keyboard. He likes pushing the button. It feels like a launch every time.
“Shadow first,” I say.
He sighs but doesn’t argue. I queue the forbidden sequence and title it with my usual piety:
EP205_COMMUNITY_DAY_SHADOW_v3_DO_NOT_SHARE
Capital letters don’t stop anything. They just make me feel responsible.
Then I duplicate the timeline and start shaving edges for the palatable version—the one Georgina will watch while doing Peloton intervals in her glass living room.
I’m halfway through when the door opens again.
Lila. Of course.
“I forgot to mention,” she says, measured. “There’s been some online chatter. About The Watcher. Someone’s archiving old feeds, piecing together timelines.”
“Someone always is,” I say.
“I thought you might want to get ahead of it.”
“We’ll never get ahead of it,” I say. “But we will pretend.” I smile with my incisors. “That’s what we’re good at.”
Her eyes flick to the timeline where Shae’s face is frozen mid-blink. “She hates that look,” Lila says, like an instinct she didn’t mean to reveal. “Says it makes her look… unsure.”
“She is unsure,” I say. “Just not about what you think.”
Lila’s gaze sharpens. “She’s sure about you,” she says. “She thinks you see her.”
“I do,” I say, and don’t add the rest—that seeing is the first step to cutting.
Her eyes drop to the folder. “I can bring more statements,” she offers. “If it helps… tone.”
“Tone doesn’t need help,” I say. “Tone is what’s left when choice is done.”
She nods like she has any idea. “You have my number.”
After she leaves, Blake blows out a breath. “She’ll eat the world for her.”
“She wants to be eaten by the world for her,” I say. “Different love language.”
He chuckles, then glances at the shadow drive. “We’re playing with fire, Cross.”
“We film arson,” I say. “Fire is the only honest thing we have.”
“Want me to send it to Georgina?” he asks.
“Schedule it for morning,” I say. “Let me sleep with the sin.”
He stands, stretches. “She has a livestream in an hour. Q&A, redemption, gratitude. Want to come watch a baptism in real time?”
“I prefer mine in post,” I say. “But bring a hard drive.”
He taps the doorframe twice and leaves.
Alone, I scrub to the second before the baton drops. One second of black. Fifteen frames of possibility. I stare until the monitor becomes a mirror.
I can make a saint out of a riot and a riot out of a saint. I can make you weep for someone you would’ve crossed the street to avoid. I can make myself believe it’s noble.
The phone pings again.
Don’t forget: end act three with a laugh. Also—any way to get Lila on camera more? She pops.
A star emoji.
I text back: She’ll pop. Promise.
I close the bay and step into the main room. The hotel window frames Southern California the way a lens does—hard sun, sharp shadows, everything too honest. Even the air looks edited.
Somewhere in those quiet hills outside Santa Clarita, Shae is practicing her saint routine—smiling for strangers, writing statements for people who don’t know they’re characters.
And me?
I’m walking toward a baptismal font made of cameras, ready to push a woman under and tell you she was saved.