4338.209 · July 28, 2018 AD
What Ten Years Buried
The plastic chairs in Interview Room Three are designed for discomfort. Louise recognises the strategy—she's sat in enough boardrooms to know when furniture is a weapon. Across the table, Charlie Claiborne looks older than she remembers, carrying the accumulated weight of a case he never solved. Louise feels the history between them surface like something drowned finally rising. She hasn't come to be managed. She's come to name names.
For Charlie Claiborne, the morning shifts the moment he sees the name on the intake form. Jeffries. Ten years since Charles vanished from his study. Ten years of an open file that mocked every procedure he'd followed, every interview he'd conducted, every lead that dissolved into nothing. Now Louise sits across from him in the same room where he'd once promised her answers he couldn't deliver.
For Louise, the chair's calculated discomfort is almost comforting in its transparency. She's spent forty-seven years learning to hold herself together when the world tries to shake her apart. She won't give them her grief—not until they've given her something in return. Her son is missing. Her brother is missing. And the deficit in her ledger has a name: Luke Smith.
Between them sits a decade of unfinished business—interviews that led nowhere, sympathies that couldn't be voiced, a professional distance that never quite obscured the weight of shared failure. Charlie knows why she's here. He knows who she'll ask for. And when she does, he'll have to decide whether reopening old wounds might finally let something heal—or whether some cases are cursed to remain unsolved.
