Guilty by Proximity

Chapter 7— Boundaries

Hazel didn't wait for a good moment to bring it up. She caught Dana in the station parking lot the next morning, coffee in hand, keys already jingling toward her cruiser.

"The night Mr. Holloway died," Hazel said, no preamble. "You told me you were pulled into something out at the county line. Between 9:50 and 10:55, there's no record of where you actually were."

Dana went still for half a second, then continued unlocking her door. "You've been reading dispatch logs."

"They're public record. I checked."

"They're public record for a reason, and it's not so my seventeen-year-old niece can build a timeline on her aunt." Dana's voice stayed even, careful, the professional register sliding into place quickly. "I was following up on a noise complaint that turned out to be nothing. It happens more than you'd think out here. I didn't log it because there was nothing to log."

"That's convenient."

"That's police work in a town with four deputies." Dana turned to face her fully now, something tired around her eyes that hadn't been there a week ago. "Hazel, I need you to hear me. I love that you care about getting this right. But every question you ask puts me in a position where I either violate protocol or watch you get more suspicious of the people who are actually trying to help you. Neither of those is good for you."

"So tell me something. Anything."

"I can't." The words sounded worn out by repetition. "You're family. That's why I trust you enough to tell you that much. It's also exactly why I can't tell you more. If I start making exceptions for you, I stop being able to do my job, and then nobody gets justice for Holloway. You understand that."

Hazel did understand it, in the same way she'd understood it the first time and the second time, and she hated how reasonable it kept managing to sound.

"Okay," she said, because there wasn't anything else to say that wouldn't just be the same argument again.

Dana softened, just slightly, reaching out to squeeze Hazel's shoulder before she got in the cruiser. "I promise you, kid. I'm on your side."

Hazel wanted to believe that. She was starting to notice how much work it was taking to keep believing it.

***

The diner was quiet by the time she met Liam that evening, the dinner rush long since cleared out, just the two of them in the back booth and the low hum of the radio behind the counter. Hazel had the text from Brynn open on her phone the whole drive over, reading it so many times the words had stopped looking like words.

She set the phone on the table between them, screen up.

Liam read it. His jaw tightened, and for a second she thought he might close off again, the way he had every other time this had come up.

He didn't.

"I was going to tell you eventually," he said instead, quiet. "I just didn't know how, without it sounding worse than it was."

"Try me."

He turned his water glass a slow half-circle, the same nervous habit he'd had with the coffee cup that first afternoon. "Holloway called me. That day. Not texted, called, which he never did. He said he needed to talk to me about something involving my dad, and he didn't want to do it at school, where anyone could see us together. He said the mill, that night, after dark. Somewhere nobody would think twice about either of us being there separately."

Hazel felt something cold settle in her chest. "Liam."

"I know how it sounds. Believe me, I've had a week to think about how it sounds." He met her eyes, and for once there was nothing polished about his expression. "I sat in that parking lot for twenty minutes because I was scared of what he was going to tell me. I kept thinking, whatever it is, once I hear it, I can't unhear it. I can't go back to just being the guy whose dad owns the mill. I was a coward. I sat there being a coward while he was—" He stopped, jaw working. "While it was already too late."

"You didn't know that."

"I know. Logically, I know that. It doesn't change what it feels like." His voice cracked slightly on the last word, and he looked, for a second, younger than eighteen, younger than the version of him that had spent four years making her feel like she was always one step behind in an argument. "I didn't tell the police because I knew exactly how it would sound. Teacher calls me privately, asks me to meet him somewhere dark and off the record, and then he turns up dead before he can tell me whatever it was. That's not an alibi. If anything, it makes me look worse."

Hazel sat with that for a moment, turning it over the way she turned over everything, except this time she wasn't looking for the c***k in his story. She was just looking at him.

"Thank you for telling me," she said finally.

"You're not going to lecture me about withholding evidence?"

"I'm going to save that for later, probably." A small, real smile, gone almost as fast as it came. "But I get it. I get why you didn't say anything."

He studied her for a moment. "You get it because of Holloway. What he was to you."

She hadn't meant to talk about this tonight. But something about the rawness still sitting in his face made it feel less like a risk than it usually would.

"He was the one who noticed," she said quietly. "After my mom. Everybody else either tiptoed around it or expected me to be fine because I acted fine, and he just—noticed. He didn't make me talk about it. He just handed me the blog, told me to go write something, like he already knew I needed somewhere to put everything that wasn't grief exactly, but wasn't nothing, either." She traced a line in the condensation on her glass. "I never told him thank you. I kept meaning to. I figured there'd be time."

"There's always supposed to be time."

"Yeah." She looked up. "That's the part nobody warns you about. How much of it you spend assuming you'll get around to it."

Liam didn't say anything right away. He just reached across the table, not quite touching her hand, close enough that she could feel the warmth of it anyway, an offer she could take or leave.

She left it there a beat longer than she meant to before pulling back to grab her bag.

"I should get home," she said, quieter than she intended. "Milo's got a test tomorrow, and if I'm not there to quiz him he won't actually study."

"Right. Of course." He said it easily enough, but something in it looked a little disappointed anyway.

She dug through her bag for her keys and stopped.

Her notebook wasn't there.

She checked again, methodically this time, every pocket, the bottom of the bag, the outside pouch where she never actually kept anything but checked out of habit anyway. The notebook that held every scrap of this investigation, from the timestamps to the tree line to the half-page of notes on Dana's timeline gap she'd scrawled that morning before school.

Gone.

"What?" Liam said, watching her face.

"My notebook. It's not here." Her voice had gone strange and flat in her own ears. "I had it this morning. I know I had it this morning."

"Maybe it's in your locker."

"It's not in my locker. I never take it to school. I keep it with me, always, specifically so it doesn't end up anywhere it could—" She stopped herself, the sentence arriving somewhere she didn't want it to go.

Somewhere it could be found by exactly the wrong person.