Guilty by Proximity

Chapter 6— What Brynn Saw

"Did you get a look at the driver?" Hazel asked.

Brynn shook her head, arms still crossed against the cold. "Too far. Too dark. I know it wasn't a truck, which rules out half the guys my dad works with. Small, dark-colored, maybe a sedan. That's it. That's genuinely all I have."

"What time was it?" Hazel asked. "Exactly, if you remember."

"Some minutes past ten. I know because I was already annoyed my dad was running late." Brynn shifted her weight, uncomfortably. "Maybe ten, fifteen minutes. Long enough that I noticed it wasn't just passing through."

"Did it go toward the mill, or was it already leaving when you saw it?"

"Toward it. Whoever it was, they were heading in, not out." Brynn hesitated. "My dad didn't get out of the booth. Didn't wave, didn't talk to whoever was driving. Just lifted the gate and let it go straight through, like it was routine."

"And my dad let it through," Liam said quietly, like he was still testing the shape of that sentence, trying to find an angle where it didn't mean what it sounded like it meant.

"Your dad wasn't even there. It was just security." Brynn hesitated. "But whoever was in that car, my dad waved them through without checking anything. Which he doesn't do. He logs everybody. It's literally his job to log everybody."

"So either he recognized the car," Hazel said slowly, working it out loud, "or somebody told him in advance to expect it."

Brynn didn't answer that. She didn't have to. The three of them stood there a moment longer in the cold, none of them quite ready to say what that implied out loud.

"Why are you telling us this now?" Hazel asked. "It's been a week."

"Because I kept telling myself it didn't matter. People come and go from that mill all the time, it's not exactly Fort Knox." Brynn's voice tightened. "And then Holloway died three days later, and I couldn't stop doing the math."

"I have to go," Brynn said finally. "If my dad's shift ends and I'm not in the lot, he'll ask questions, and I really don't want to explain this conversation to him." She looked at Liam, something complicated passing behind her eyes. "I didn't do this for you, by the way. I did it for Holloway. He wrote me a recommendation letter last year. He was decent to people who didn't matter to anyone else."

"I know," Liam said. "Thank you anyway."

Brynn was already walking away by the time she answered, her voice trailing back over her shoulder like she couldn't quite bring herself to say it to his face. "Yeah. Whatever."

They walked back toward the parking lot in silence for a while, the kind that used to feel like a standoff between them and now, somehow, felt more like two people just thinking.

"Are you okay?" Hazel asked, surprising herself with the question.

"Honestly? No." Liam shoved his hands in his pockets. "Every version of this points closer to my dad, and I keep waiting to feel something other than sick about that, and I don't."

"That's not a bad thing. Feeling sick about it, I mean." Hazel kicked a piece of gravel off the path, watching it skitter. "It'd be worse if you didn't."

"Four years of you telling me I'm a coward for how I handle my dad, and now you're being nice to me about it. I don't know what to do with that."

"Don't get used to it." But there wasn't much heat behind it, and they both seemed to know it.

"I keep thinking I should already know how to feel about this," Liam said, quieter now.

"He's my dad. I've spent my whole life defending him without even thinking about it. Now I can't tell if I'm still doing that, or if I've actually stopped."

"You don't have to know yet."

"That's easy for you to say. You've never had to wonder if you were protecting the wrong person."

Hazel didn't answer that right away. It sat there between them, heavier than either of them had probably meant it to be.

"For what it's worth," he said, quieter, "you're easier to work with than I expected."

"You're easier to work with than I expected too. Which is genuinely upsetting."

He almost laughed. It surprised her how much she liked the sound of it.

***

Ethan was waiting up again when Hazel got home, though this time he didn't have his keys in hand, just a mug of something gone cold on the table in front of him, like he'd made it an hour ago and forgotten about it in favor of worrying.

"Milo said you've been out a lot," he said, not quite an accusation.

"I've been busy."

"That's not what I asked." He gestured to the chair across from him, and after a second, she sat. "I'm not trying to interrogate you, Hazel. I just — since your mom, it's been you managing things around here more than it's been me managing you. I know that's on me as much as it's on anyone. But I'm still your dad. I'd like to actually know what's going on in your life once in a while, not just find out from your brother."

Something in her chest tightened, the specific, familiar discomfort of somebody trying to get closer than she was built to let them.

"There's nothing to tell. I'm helping figure out what really happened to Mr. Holloway."

"That's not nothing."

"It's not dangerous, either."

"You don't know that." He said it gently, not like a warning, more like a fact he wished weren't true. "I'm not asking you to stop. I watched you decide that already, and I know better than to fight you on something you've made up your mind about. I'm just asking you to let me in a little. You don't have to carry everything by yourself just because you've gotten good at it."

"Did you know him well? Mr. Holloway?"

Ethan considered that for a second, like the question had caught him off guard. "Well enough. He came by the diner sometimes, before your mom got sick. Decent man. Always tipped too much and pretended it was a mistake." He studied her. "Is that why this matters so much to you? Or is it something else?"

Hazel looked down at her hands. There was a version of this conversation where she told him everything — the tree line, the phone number, the planner, the half-formed shape of something she didn't fully understand yet but was afraid of anyway. She could feel the words sitting right there.

"I'm fine, Dad," she said instead. "I've got it."

He didn't say anything else. He just reached over and moved her water glass an inch closer to her, the way he used to when she was small and too upset to ask for things directly, and let the gesture say what he wasn't going to push for out loud.

Milo and Desa were still up when she passed through the living room, some cartoon playing too loud, Desa half-asleep against Milo's shoulder with her thumb close to her mouth.

"You're back late," Milo said, not looking away from the screen.

"Detective work."

"Sure." He glanced over, taking in whatever was on her face. "You want the good spot on the couch? Des is basically asleep right now. I can move her."

"I'm okay. Going to work for a bit."

"Course you are." He said it without judgment, just fact, the way you'd note the weather. "Don't stay up all night again. You get weird when you're tired. Weirder."

"Noted."

Desa stirred just enough to mumble something that might have been Hazel's name, then settled back against Milo's shoulder without fully waking. Hazel stood there a second longer than she needed to, watching the two of them in the blue flicker of the TV, before she made herself go upstairs.

It was well past midnight by the time Hazel pulled up the timeline again — not her own photos this time, but the official incident report Dana had read parts of over the phone that first night, the one Hazel had written down in pieces without fully understanding what she was recording.

She laid it next to what Brynn had just told them. Tuesday. Some minutes past ten. The car heading toward the mill, waved through without a log. Three days before the murder.

It didn't prove anything yet. She made herself say that out loud, once, so she wouldn't let the shape of a theory get ahead of what she actually knew. A car with no ID wasn't the same as a person. A gap in a log wasn't the same as a lie.

Then she pulled up the one detail that had been sitting in the back of her mind since that first night at the station: Dana's own whereabouts that night, mentioned almost in passing, the kind of thing nobody thought to question because it came from the sheriff herself. Pulled into something out at the county line.

Hazel had never actually gotten a straight answer on what that something was.

She cross-referenced times without really meaning to build a case, just following the same restless habit that always made her double-check her own work. Dana's shift log, pulled from an old public meeting minutes packet where attendance times got noted almost as an afterthought. A dispatch call logged at 9:50. Another one at 10:55.

In between those two calls, there was a gap of just over half an hour with no record of where Dana had actually been.

Hazel sat back from the screen, the room gone very quiet around her.

It probably meant nothing. County line calls didn't always get logged cleanly. She knew that. She told herself that twice, out loud, like saying it would make it more true.

Her phone buzzed on the desk beside her, late enough that the sound made her flinch. A text, from a number she didn't have saved, though she recognized it instantly from the conversation an hour earlier.

Brynn: There's something Liam never told you about that night. Ask him where he really was before he got to the mill.