Chapter Four: Panic

The extra edition hit the town like a stone dropped into still water.

By that afternoon, the supermarket in Blackharbor had been stripped bare. People were nailing boards over doors and windows; others were loading their families and fleeing inland. Gas lines stretched long; the fog hummed with engine noise and low curses. Twenty years of silence had been cracked open by a single sentence, and only now did everyone realize: the girls who had vanished, they had never left on their own.

Lila stood in the café doorway and watched it all. This was the moment she had longed for, day and night — the truth brought into the light. But when it actually came, it did not bring relief. It brought something she had never anticipated.

Shame.

The whole town knew. The grocer knew, the pastor knew, the bus driver who loaded the kids onto the school bus knew. Ruth at the church knew too — the woman who had smiled at Lila in the doorway every Sunday, and behind that smile Lila had never wondered what was hidden. Every one of them had traded their silence for a job, a loan, a paycheck at the Garrett Lumber Mill. And her sister had been slowly drowned in that very silence.

“What are you thinking about?” Caine stepped up beside her.

“I’m thinking,” Lila said softly, “that if I had been a little more sensible back then, if I had noticed sooner that something was wrong with Emma —”

“You were seven years old.”

“Seven years old still remembers her turning around to smile at me before she walked out that door.”

Caine did not argue. He simply took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. The rain started again, fine and dense, falling between them.

“Listen to me.” He turned her to face him. “From now on, you are not to be alone.”

“Caine —”

“This isn’t a discussion.” His voice was steady, and left no room for one. “Shaw and Pruitt know you’re a living witness. They also know that once this goes to trial, Lila Mason’s testimony plus the physical evidence we’re holding means life without parole. A man with nothing left to lose will do anything.”

“Then what do you want?”

He looked toward the lone little cabin on the cliff’s edge — his home, built on the bluff, three sides open to the sea, with only a narrow road leading up to it.

“Move in with me,” he said. “Until they’re caught.”

In the fog, the cabin’s lamp was lit, like a single fishing light floating on the water. Lila looked at it for a long time.

She nodded.

But just as she turned to fetch her car keys, Caine’s phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen, and his face darkened, inch by inch.

It was an alert from the sheriff’s office: a burned-out trailer had been found near the old cannery. Inside were two bodies, burned beyond recognition.

They were not Shaw and Pruitt.

They were the two middlemen who had always run errands for Garrett.