Chapter Twenty-Three

The two days after the story ran passed in a blur Callum would struggle, afterward, to properly reconstruct in order. The Herald’s phone lines had not stopped ringing since the first edition hit the stands — some calls supportive, strangers he’d never met thanking him for finally saying what half the town had apparently suspected for decades without ever quite finding the nerve to say aloud themselves; others considerably less so, an anonymous caller on the second morning who’d told Grant’s assistant, in a voice she described afterward as chillingly calm rather than angry, that the paper ought to be more careful about printing accusations it couldn’t yet properly prove. Grant had taken that call’s details straight to Rob’s inbox within the hour, and Callum had spent an uncomfortable ten minutes being talked through, gently but firmly, exactly what kind of precautions he should be taking with his own movements over the coming days.