Chapter 31

The episode went live at 8:03 p.m.

By 8:11, Evelyn’s website crashed.

Rain pressed softly against her apartment windows while upload notifications exploded across every screen in the living room. Her inbox refreshed faster than she could read. Reddit threads multiplied by the minute. TikTok clips from the episode had already started circulating with captions like:

THE BLACK HOLLOW COVER-UP

and:

THEY EXPERIMENTED ON CHILDREN.

Mara stood barefoot beside the kitchen counter holding cold coffee and staring at analytics with open disbelief.

“Okay,” she said slowly, “this may actually become federal-level bad.”

Evelyn barely heard her.

She sat motionless at the recording desk with headphones hanging around her neck, pulse still uneven from hearing her own voice expose Black Hollow publicly for the first time.

Not all of it.

She hadn’t mentioned Adrian.

That part had been deliberate.

Victor Cross was dead.

The retreat was real.

The experiments happened.

But Adrian remained absent from the narrative.

Mara noticed immediately.

“You protected him.”

Evelyn looked toward the rain-dark windows.

“I told the truth.”

“That is an extremely selective definition of truth.”

Maybe.

But Evelyn still remembered Adrian standing inside that flooded archive room while Lena’s tape played through static.

They induced it.

He looked horrified hearing it too.

Not guilty.

That distinction mattered to her more than she wanted it to.

Mara dropped onto the couch heavily.

“The internet thinks you’re either the victim of a psychiatric conspiracy or the greatest unreliable narrator in podcast history.”

“Both can exist simultaneously.”

“That’s deeply unhealthy.”

A fair point.

Thunder rolled softly across the city while Evelyn reopened social feeds again.

The episode had spread beyond true crime communities already.

Former Black Hollow employees were anonymously posting.

Archived newspaper articles resurfaced.

People claimed relatives vanished there decades ago.

And buried beneath the viral panic sat something far worse:

Hope.

Because if Lena uncovered all of this before disappearing—

then maybe she had survived long enough to hide.

Evelyn hated how badly she wanted that possibility now.

The thought alone felt dangerous.

Her phone buzzed again.

Mercer.

She answered immediately.

“You trying to start a riot?” he asked without greeting.

“You reopened the case.”

“Yes, quietly.” Exhaustion roughened his voice. “You just detonated it online.”

Rain tapped steadily against the windows behind her.

“People deserve to know.”

“People deserve facts.”

“The retreat existed.”

“I know.”

“The experiments happened.”

Another pause.

Then:

“We found blood in the lower archive level.”

Cold moved slowly through her chest.

“Simon?”

“We don’t know yet.”

The uncertainty hollowed the room instantly.

Evelyn looked toward the muted television screen where news coverage had already started replaying aerial footage of Black Hollow surrounded by police vehicles.

“Did you find anyone else inside?”

“No.”

But Mercer hesitated slightly before continuing.

“We did find evidence somebody cleared portions of the building recently.”

Not abandoned, then.

Maintained.

Used.

Evelyn pressed two fingers against her forehead.

“Mercer…”

“What?”

“I think someone’s still running parts of Victor’s work.”

Silence followed.

Not disbelief.

Recognition.

“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” he admitted quietly.

Thunder rolled again outside.

Mara watched Evelyn carefully from across the room now, reading her expression the way only years of friendship allowed.

“Be careful who you trust,” Mercer added.

The sentence lingered heavily after the call ended.

Because every warning now seemed aimed at Adrian.

And every instinct inside her still moved toward him anyway.

The livestream started at 10:47 p.m.

Evelyn almost canceled it three separate times beforehand.

Not from fear of public reaction.

Because exhaustion had begun eroding the edges of her concentration again. Rainstorms still made her skin feel too tight, her thoughts too loud.

And somewhere beneath all of it sat a growing terror she still hadn’t voiced aloud:

What if Victor’s conditioning never ended?

The livestream counter passed fifty thousand viewers before she even spoke.

Comments flooded instantly.

ASK ABOUT ADRIAN

DID THEY BRAINWASH YOU

IS LENA DEAD

WHO WAS FOLLOWING YOU

WE BELIEVE YOU

YOU NEED HELP

The contradiction of internet sympathy always fascinated her.

People wanted suffering as long as it remained consumable.

Evelyn adjusted the microphone slightly.

Her apartment looked dim behind her except for city lights blurred by rain across the windows.

For once, she didn’t perform calmness.

She simply looked tired.

“I know a lot of you think this story stopped being real once it became viral,” she said quietly. “But people actually died here.”

The comment feed slowed slightly.

She continued carefully.

“Black Hollow Retreat existed. Victor Cross treated children there using dissociation conditioning tied to environmental triggers.”

Rain tapped softly against the glass behind her.

“And Lena Vale discovered evidence linking those treatments to memory suppression before she disappeared.”

Her throat tightened slightly saying Lena’s name aloud again.

“She tried to warn me.”

Thousands of comments rolled upward.

Some supportive.

Some accusing.

Some already turning the entire thing into entertainment.

Evelyn kept speaking anyway.

Because this was the only thing she still knew how to do when afraid.

Tell the story before it swallowed her first.

Then the livestream audio crackled.

Mara looked up sharply from the couch.

“You hearing that?”

Static spread softly through Evelyn’s headphones.

At first she assumed weather interference.

Then a new caller notification appeared on-screen.

UNKNOWN NUMBER.

Mara frowned immediately. “Don’t answer that.”

But Evelyn already felt cold moving slowly through her chest.

Because somewhere deep inside her nervous system, instinct had started screaming.

Not danger.

Recognition.

The static intensified briefly.

Then the system auto-connected before she could decline.

Silence filled the livestream.

Tens of thousands of listeners waiting.

Rain tapping softly behind her.

Then breathing.

A woman’s breathing.

Uneven.

Shaky.

Evelyn stopped moving entirely.

The caller spoke softly through static distortion.

“…Eve?”

The world seemed to narrow instantly around the sound.

Not memory.

Not imagination.

Voice.

Real voice.

Mara went pale beside the couch.

The livestream comments exploded so quickly they became unreadable.

Evelyn’s throat tightened painfully.

Because even through distortion—

she knew that voice.

And when she finally spoke, it barely sounded louder than rain.

“Lena?”