4338.215 · August 3, 2018 AD
Almost Everything, Almost Nothing
Alexander Stout sits Sarah Lahey down in Interview Room 2 and spends two hours watching a young detective answer every question he asks without ever quite saying the thing that's living in the pauses between her words. She's grieving — he's certain of that. She's hiding something — he's certain of that too. The problem is they're coming from the same place inside her, and pulling one out might destroy the other.
Interview Room 2. The smaller room. The narrower table. Stout chose it deliberately — close enough for connection, close enough for the walls to do their work. Sarah Lahey arrives at fourteen thirty-four. The first thing he registers is the exhaustion sitting in the architecture of her face. The second is the bandaged hand she positions out of sight before the chair is fully pulled in.
What follows is a two-hour conversation in which a young detective builds walls in real time. Answers that are technically true and functionally incomplete. Pauses that grow longer with every question — three seconds, four, five, seven, nine. A relationship with Karl Jenkins that was appropriate — a word that concedes the question's validity whilst declining to answer it. A character reference deployed where a direct answer was required, twice, in the same structural position. The Berriedale visit sealed shut. The evening of 1 August unverifiable. A photograph taken at a crime scene and never reported. Two names offered only when the room left nowhere else to stand.
Stout tracks it all. The evasions. The redirects. The grief that's genuine enough to almost disguise what it's wrapped around. During the break, he writes three words in his notebook: Protecting. But whom? By the end, he knows. The lie and the truth are sharing the same breath — and separating them might destroy both.
