The World Never Ended novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Set

Shane drove with both hands on the wheel and did not speak for most of the way.

The blue dot on the nanny's phone, which she had pressed into my hand, had stopped moving.

It sat on the county road's last turn, inside the fence of the old warehouse.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you've been chewing since the stage."

He kept his eyes on the road.

"I read the work order at four this afternoon," he said. "At my desk. Before you walked in."

My hands went cold on the phone.

"You told the ballroom you didn't know what it meant until you saw the date on the screen."

"I lied, Cora."

"You said it into a microphone, to two hundred people. To me."

"I know."

"Rule one."

"I know what rule one is."

"No lies. Ever. I said it to your face the day I made the rules."

"I remember."

"Then tell me why."

He pulled onto the shoulder and stopped the truck, and the headlights lit a mile marker and nothing else.

He turned in the seat to face me.

"At four o'clock I saw the install date," he said. "I counted back to the day Audra fell. Two weeks."

"And you knew what it meant."

"I knew it meant Dean had a camera on those stairs before anyone was hurt. I knew what that did to everything you'd been told."

"So you had a work order that proved it, and you kept it in your pocket."

"I had a piece of paper with a date," he said. "Dean would have called it forged, or a coincidence, or a clerical mistake. A paper doesn't do anything in a room full of his friends."

"And the footage does."

"The footage had never been looked at by anyone. If I told you at four, you would have gone in there to ask Dean about the date. He would have been ready."

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