Say it plainly," Elara said. "I need you to say exactly what you saw."
The woman across from her in the coffee shop was sixty-something, grey-haired, with the careful hands of someone who had been carrying something heavy for months. Her name was June Carver. She'd been on the pavement the night of the accident. She'd given a statement to the police. She'd watched that statement go nowhere.
"The car accelerated," June said. Her voice was low and precise. "I know what acceleration looks like, Ms. Voss. I drove a lorry for twenty years. That car was not out of control. It didn't swerve. It didn't brake. It sped up." She paused. "Toward the two of you. Deliberately."
The coffee shop noise continued around them — orders being called, cups hitting saucers, someone laughing by the window.
Elara's hands were wrapped around a mug she wasn't drinking.
"You told the police," she said.
"I told the officer on scene. He wrote something down. I called to follow up twice and was told the case was closed — the driver couldn't be traced, the vehicle plates were unregistered, the CCTV on that block had a forty-eight-hour data cycle and had already been overwritten." June's jaw tightened. "I'm telling you because I saw your name in the divorce announcement in the paper last week, and I thought — I thought you deserved to know that what happened to your husband was not an accident."
The last three words landed like stones in still water.
*Not an accident.*
"Who knew you'd be on that street?" June asked.
"We weren't supposed to be there," Elara said slowly. "We'd changed our plans last minute. We were going to a different restaurant — Callum's favourite — and I asked to walk instead of taking the car because it wasn't raining yet." She stopped. "Only a handful of people knew we'd changed plans."
June said nothing.
She didn't need to.
— ✦ —
Elara sat in her car for twelve minutes after June left.
She didn't move. She just sat with her hands flat on the steering wheel and the engine off and let the implications settle into the room of her mind that she kept for facts she couldn't change.
Someone had known. Someone had known their route. Someone had wanted Callum hurt — or her hurt — or both. Someone had taken careful advantage of that dark corner of Aldgate Street and a driver who was never found and a CCTV system that ran on a convenient two-day cycle.
And whoever it was had gotten exactly what they wanted.
Callum had lost five years of his life.
Victoria Ashford had walked into the gap.
She picked up her phone. She scrolled to a number. She stopped.
She couldn't call Callum. Callum would not believe her — or worse, he would repeat it to Victoria before Elara had gathered enough to be credible. She had no proof. She had a sixty-year-old lorry driver and a police note that said *witness described vehicle accelerating* and nothing else.
She needed more.
She started the car.
Her phone rang before she could pull out of the space.
Diana Reid.
Elara stared at the name. Diana hadn't called her since the day she'd walked out of the Reid house. They'd spoken once at Elara's car on the drive, Diana's hands on her face, Diana's tears. That was the last of it.
She answered.
"Diana."
"Elara." Diana's voice was wrong. Controlled but wrong — the voice of a woman who had just made a decision she couldn't unmake. "I need to see you. Not at the house. Somewhere else. Somewhere Callum won't know."
"Why?"
A pause. Then, barely above a whisper:
"Because
I know who was driving that car."