The reek of stale beer and old regrets clung to the air in The Swamp Devil, a smell as thick and suffocating as the Louisiana humidity. It was a fitting perfume for the man glowering at me from across the splintered bar.
Nash “Gravedigger” Guidry.
He was built of swamp muscle and shadows, his face a roadmap of hard living, and his eyes—a stormy grey that promised nothing but ruin—were fixed on me with chilling intensity.
He hadn’t said more than five words, but every coiled line of his body screamed a warning I was too desperate to heed.
“The email said you were with her,” I repeated, my voice tight, refusing to break under his stare. “The night she died. It said you know what happened to my sister.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. He wiped the bar with a stained rag, the motion slow and deliberate, a predator delaying the strike.
“An email told you to walk into the devil’s living room?” His voice was a low gravelly rasp, like whiskey poured over stones. “You got a death wish, little bird.”
“I have questions.”
“And I have a locked door. Use it.”
Before I could fire back, the screen door of the bar groaned open, slicing through the tension with a sliver of evening light and a silhouette I would know anywhere.
Sheriff Ben Carter. My Ben.
He filled the doorway, his uniform crisp, his presence an immediate and unwelcome anchor to a past I’d fled ten years ago.
His gaze found me, and the hard lines of the lawman softened into something achingly familiar—concern, regret, and a flicker of the boy who’d given me my first kiss by Cypress Creek.
Then his eyes slid to Nash, and the sheriff was back, his hand resting instinctively on his hip.
“Callie.” His voice was a soft reprimand, laced with the honeyed drawl I used to love. “What are you doing here? I told you to wait for me.”
“You told me to be patient,” I corrected, the words coming out sharper than I intended. “I’ve been patient for a decade, Ben.”
“This isn’t the way,” he said, stepping fully inside, his presence shrinking the already cramped space. He moved between me and the bar, a human shield of decency and order.
He didn’t look at Nash, but the dismissal was louder than a shout. To Ben, a man like Nash Guidry was just part of the swamp’s filth, something to be managed, not engaged with.
“Guidry, she’s with me. Whatever business you think you have is over.”
Nash let out a low, humorless laugh that grated on my nerves. “She came to me, Sheriff. Asking questions you don’t want answered.”
The air crackled, thick with the history of two men who represented the two warring halves of this town: the polished, smiling facade and the rotten, secrets-drenched underbelly.
Ben represented the life I was supposed to have had—safe, predictable, respectable. Nash was the embodiment of the town’s darkness, the same darkness that had swallowed my sister whole.
“Stay away from her,” Ben warned, his voice dropping to a deadly calm. “This is official police business.”
“Was it ‘official business’ ten years ago?” Nash leaned forward, his knuckles white on the bar. “Or was it just you and your daddy cleaning up a mess for your friends?”
Ben’s jaw tightened. “Get out of here, Callie. Now.”
He reached for my arm, his touch meant to be reassuring, protective. But it felt like a manacle. I pulled back, my gaze whipping between them.
Ben’s handsome face was a mask of controlled frustration, his eyes pleading with me to trust him, to let him handle it, to be the good girl he remembered. But Nash’s stormy gaze held something else entirely.
Not pity. Not menace. A strange, knowing sorrow.
It was the look of a man who had stared into the same abyss I was now teetering on the edge of.
“He knows something,” I insisted, my voice rising. “He was there. Why won’t you question him properly?”
“Because he’s a liar and a drunk!” Ben’s control finally snapped, his voice echoing in the small room.
“He’s feeding you poison because he’s got nothing else. Hannah made a mistake getting involved with him. It was a tragic accident, and his testimony would only twist that.”
A tragic accident. The town’s official lullaby. The lie that had allowed everyone to sleep at night for ten years while I lay awake, haunted by the ghost of a sister I barely recognized in their sanitized stories.
“A mistake?” Nash’s voice was dangerously quiet now, but it cut through Ben’s anger like a razor.
He finally looked at me, truly looked at me, and the world tilted on its axis. “She didn’t make a mistake. She made a choice. She chose me.”
My breath hitched. Ben went rigid.
“She loved me,” Nash said, the words raw, brutal, and utterly convincing. He held my gaze, and I saw a decade of his own grief reflected there.
“We were leaving, Callie. Together. Had a bag packed and two bus tickets to anywhere but here. She wasn’t running from me. She was running from this.”
He gestured with the rag, a sweeping motion that encompassed the bar, the town, the man standing between us. “From this whole rotten cage and the polite, smiling men who keep the doors locked.”
The floor fell away. My carefully constructed reality—Hannah, the perfect daughter; Ben, the golden-boy protector—crumbled into dust.
All these years, I’d mourned a girl who made a simple, fatal error. But Nash was painting the portrait of a woman I didn’t know, a woman making a desperate, brave escape.
Ben grabbed my arm again, harder this time. “Don’t listen to him. He’s trying to manipulate you. Let’s go.”
“No,” I whispered, staring at Nash. The lie wasn’t his. I could feel it in my bones. The lie was the story I’d been told my entire life.
Nash delivered the final, killing blow. He ignored Ben completely, his focus entirely on me.
“You want the truth? Ask your sheriff where he was that night. Ask him what a rookie deputy was doing out by the old cypress tree, watching. Not helping. Just… watching.”
Snap.
The sound was silent, but I felt it in my soul. A clean, shattering break. My vision tunneled.
Ben’s hand on my arm was suddenly alien, the touch of a stranger, a liar.
Watching.
The word echoed in the sudden, roaring silence of my mind.
He was there. He knew.
All these years, his comforting words, his gentle sympathies, his promises to keep digging… all of it had been a performance. He wasn’t protecting me from the truth. He was protecting himself.
I wrenched my arm from his grasp, stumbling back a step. The shock didn’t paralyze me. It ignited me.
A cold, cleansing fire burned through the fog of grief, incinerating the naive girl who had walked into this bar. In her place, something new and hard and sharp was forged.
I looked at Ben Carter, truly saw him for the first time, and the love I’d clung to for a decade curdled into contempt. His face was pale, his carefully constructed composure finally cracking.
He knew. He knew I could see the lie in his eyes.
“Callie… listen to me…” he started, his voice strained, desperate.
I held up a hand, silencing him. The gesture was steady, absolute. I was no longer a victim begging for scraps of truth. I was the arbiter of it.
I turned my back on him, my focus shifting from the past to the future, a future that had just been rewritten in a single, brutal sentence. I walked toward the door, my steps sure and purposeful.
Nash watched me go, his expression unreadable, but I wasn’t leaving. I was repositioning.
On the dusty threshold, I stopped. I didn’t look back. I pulled my phone from my pocket, my fingers swiping across the screen with practiced ease.
I opened my audio recording app, the one I used for my investigative podcast—the project that had been my only solace, my only weapon, for two years.
I pressed the red button.
Then, I spoke. My voice was clear, cold, and carried across the charged silence of the bar to the two men who had just ripped my world apart.
“My name is Callie Evans. Ten years ago, my sister, Hannah Evans, was found dead in the Veridian bayou. The official cause was ruled an accident.”
I paused, taking a steadying breath, the air tasting of ozone and imminent war. “That was a lie.”
I turned, my phone held up like a shield, its small red light blinking, recording, bearing witness. I met Ben’s horrified gaze first, letting him see the utter absence of the girl he once knew.
Then I looked at Nash, whose stormy eyes held a flicker of something new—a dawning, dangerous respect.
“This is the first recording for a new series,” I announced, my voice ringing with unshakable conviction.
“I’m calling it ‘Whiskey and Lies.’ And I’m not leaving my hometown until I expose every single person who covered up my sister’s murder. Starting with the Veridian Sheriff’s Department.”