Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Evelyn
On my screen, Shae lifts a crate of dented peaches at Hearth our handheld stayed in the corner. The mic Lila flagged picks up cutlery, wine, and a quartet of women trying to outbid each other on a signed cookbook.
Then—there—a pocket of laughter off-axis. Shae and Blake, not in frame, but close to whatever mic got drunkenly taped to a pillar.
Shae: “If you give me one more angle where my pores look like national parks, I’m taking away your lens privileges.”
Blake (low): “You’re the only subject I have to stop making prettier.”
Shae: “Flattery is the tax you pay to stand near me.”
Blake: “Then audit me.”
Their voices spill into each other like whiskey into water. Heat in it. Thick with flirtation.
I don’t move. Blake doesn’t either. The moment isn’t a scandal; it’s worse. Chemistry you can’t line-item out of a narrative. Bad optics with good ratings.
He clears his throat. “Context,” he says too fast. “We were five feet apart, six donors between us, two cameras rolling.”
“And a mic that wanted a raise,” I say. I bookmark it anyway. I have a drawer labeled Leverage. It isn’t for Shae.
“The shot list from later?” he offers, eager to move. “Night contributions in the pantry, the prayer with Lila, the closet confession.”
“Play the closet confession.” My voice comes out even. Great. I’m a professional.
The small room is beige by design—meant to be forgettable. Our GoPro lives in a tissue box. Shae and Lila sit shoulder-to-shoulder on a storage ottoman, hall light slicing the floor in a hard angle.
Lila: “I… didn’t come tonight to be on camera.”
Shae: “You’re not.” She glances straight at our lens and smiles, slow and dismissive. “That’s a smoke detector.”
Lila: “I can’t stop thinking about… about him. He texts from new numbers. He says he’ll come to the house. I hate him on my best days and miss him on my worst.”
Shae: “He’s tempting you to answer. That’s all hunger is. Answering is feeding.”
Lila: “You make it sound easy.”
Shae: “Easy isn’t safe. It’s just obvious.” She tucks a strand of Lila’s hair behind her ear with obscene tenderness. “Block the number. Block the feeling. If you need, I’ll do it for you.”
Lila’s shoulders unclench like a problem solved.
Blake exhales. “That plays,” he says. “Even if it’s predatory, it plays.”
“It’s both,” I say. “That’s the world.”
I snip the tail so we don’t see Shae stand and pocket a phone that isn’t hers. I’m not here to incriminate—yet. I’m here to seduce.
I ladder the scenes—soup line, teen circle, closet confession, a wide of the pantry with Lila loading a cart like a woman who bins her grief. The spine tightens. Somewhere, a network exec will call this arc.
The door creaks again—Harper this time. Half-smile under nerves, a tote bag of cables that says I belong here and I still ask permission.
“Can I?” she asks, hovering.
“Always,” I lie.
She steps in and clocks the paused frame—Shae’s hand in Lila’s hair. Something uneasy skates across her face.
“I didn’t know you were… using that,” she says.
“We’re using kindness,” I say. “It photographs well.”
Harper huffs a laugh, then sobers. “I got another anonymous email,” she says, lighter than it deserves. “The Watcher. Or a copycat. Audio attachments. Old jail calls. Declan—” She stops like she tasted the word. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing never emails at two a.m.,” I say.
She shifts. “James thinks I’m obsessing.”
“James thinks you’re in love with your subject,” Blake says, deliberately casual.
“James thinks lots of things.” Harper’s smile goes iron. “He’s in New York for meetings this week. He can think them there.”
I mark the micro-stiffness in Blake’s jaw.
“Can we… balance it?” Harper asks, nodding at the timeline. “This part. The closeness. I don’t want to…” She searches for the moral. “Exploit.”
“You host a true-crime podcast,” I say gently. “Exploitation is your BPM.”
“Ouch,” she says, but she’s smiling again. “Fine. Make me a villain.”
“No,” I say. “We reserve that role for the audience.” I cut two more frames from the macaroni stack so Shae looks more capable than human. “Viewers hate their own appetite. We feed them and call it fasting.”
Harper’s eyes flick to Blake. “She always talk like this?”
“Only when she’s awake,” he says.
She snorts and drops the tote. “Okay. Show me what makes her a saint.”
I do. For ten minutes, I let the cut sing. The pantry becomes a church; the volunteers a congregation; Shae the choir leader who knows which lyric unlocks a cry. We end on her laugh—the small one—and drop to black.
Harper presses her lips together. “It’s… good.”
“Say the other thing,” I tell her.
“It’s… too good,” she admits. “It makes me feel like I should forgive her for things I haven’t decided she did.”
“That’s the art,” I say. “We give you vertigo. You’ll call it insight later.”
Harper nods, rattled. “Do you ever… worry?”
“About what?” Blake asks.
“About being complicit,” she says. “I wanted to help. Now I’m… brand-adjacent to her. If she—” She stops, swallows. “If she’s not what we want her to be.”
“She’s exactly what we want her to be,” I say. “That’s the problem.”
Harper looks down at her hands. She’s taken the ring off. I watch the ghost of it on her finger. Noted.
She grabs the tote and stands. “Okay. Recording at five. I’ll… watch the cut again tonight.”
“Send notes before midnight,” I say. “Georgina sleeps with her phone on her face.”
Harper gives a small laugh and is gone.
Blake watches the empty doorway. “She’s cracking,” he says softly.
“She’s editing her conscience,” I say. “We all are.”
We go back to the work. I drop a shot of Lila’s hand on a can of peaches, the label half torn. I like ripped labels; they imply history. I bridge to a close-up of Shae’s wrist—faint white lines like someone once kept score on her skin. Real or cosmetic? Doesn’t matter. The world sees what it wants.
The door snicks again. Lila, with two coffees.
“Fuel,” she says, setting one by my elbow. Her eyes sweep the timeline and snag. “Not that one.”
She means the closet confession. The hair tuck. The micro-ownership.
“Why not?” I ask.
“It makes her look…” Lila searches, then fails on purpose. “It makes her look powerful in the wrong way.”
“Is there a right way?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, surprising me. “When people give her power on purpose. Not when she takes it.”
Blake shifts, watching her. “And are you one of the people giving it?”
“I’m one of the people making sure she doesn’t choke on it,” Lila says. “Some of us prefer our saints alive.”
She leaves before I can catalogue the sentence. I sip the coffee. It’s annoyingly perfect.
Blake’s mouth curves. “She’s in love with your subject.”
“Everyone is,” I say. “Different love languages.”
He doesn’t answer. The donor-dinner USB sits like a dare on my desk. Chemistry is accelerant; editors are professional arsonists.
“Play the pantry prayer,” I say, and he cues the circle. Volunteers bow their heads. The cross stays crooked.
Pastor: “Lord, bless the hands that serve and the mouths that ask. May we meet need with compassion and fame with humility.”
Shae keeps her eyes open through the prayer. It reads as attentiveness. It reads as hunger.
I cut to Lila on amen. Her eyes are on Shae, not God. She mouths the word amen.
The episode snaps into place with a mean, satisfying click. We’ve made our saint. I park the playhead on Shae’s laugh and let it fill the bay—short, disarming, a promise with a blade inside.
“Good?” Blake asks.
“Sharp,” I say.
He doesn’t look at me when he says, casual as he can fake, “Evelyn, if there were… allegations. About me. About lines. Would you—”
“Cut you out?” I ask. “Or cut around you?”
“Either,” he says. “Both.”
“I’d grade you warmer and hope they forgave you,” I say, and he laughs. It sounds too close to the one I just cut.
My phone buzzes. GEORGINA – NETFLIX: Need Shae in the morning show too. Can we pull heartstring bites from the charity day? Nothing manipulative.
I text back: We have humility and teenagers. It’s basically a rosary.
She replies with a string of prayer-hand emojis. I picture her Pilates instructor correcting her form. I picture America correcting nothing.
Blake stands. “You want me at the night shoots with Harper, or are we pretending boundaries?”
“Pretend,” I say. “Then violate. It reads as romance.”
He pauses at the door. “You saw the donor clip was harmless.”
“I saw it was human,” I say. “Humans are combustible.”
He goes. I export. The blue bar crawls. The room hums.
I rest my hand on the shadow drive—the office whisper, the donor-dinner laughter, the hair tuck, the phone pocketed. People like me call it “context.” Truth is, context is a lockpick. We keep it for when the story slams a door.
On the monitor, frozen mid-frame, Shae leans toward Lila with that smile people mistake for mercy. I count three micro-movements and understand why Blake shoots her like this.
Yes, there’s something between them. Not what Lila thinks. Not what Harper fears. The thing that happens when a camera loves its subject and the subject returns the favor. Dark. Practical. Beautiful television.
I tap the monitor glass with a knuckle, a ridiculous superstition. “You’re not a saint,” I tell her under my breath. “You’re a mirror.”
Then I roll the cut and polish the edges until you can’t see my fingerprints anymore.
My mind circles on the wildcard that remains: the one person who stopped talking.