“Then it’s easy. You’re Aaron Holland from now on. You live on a sailboat and sail the Caribbean. Every few months you come back to Jamaica to work at a rum distillery. There are worse things than that.”

“I’m worried about the money. I don’t feel right taking it from you.”

“It’s already done,” Avery said. “Too late to worry now.”

Her contract from HAP News had been finalized earlier in the fall. It named Avery as the host of American Events for the next five years. Dwight Corey had negotiated tirelessly and Mosley Germaine and David Hillary had signed off on the final details of the contract that would pay Avery $3 million a year for five years. Even at that number, Avery argued that she was undervalued. The show’s most recent numbers had proven she was correct. The Victoria Ford special, which spanned three episodes, had brought the second highest ratings in American Events history. That Avery’s investigative reporting, and the new evidence she unearthed, had spurred the re-opening of the Cameron Young investigation only added notoriety to her already powerful name. Cameron Young was back in the news, and serious questions were being raised about who had killed him. The evidence that had once so clearly pointed at Victoria Ford was now being questioned. The idea that the blood and the urine had so clearly been manipulated and planted came under immense scrutiny. The Innocence Project had even gotten involved, promising to continue the crusade to prove Victoria Ford’s innocence.

The American Events special had not named names as to who might have planted the evidence, because to do so was a liability the network was not prepared to take. And it had never been Avery’s goal to solve the case. She’d made just two promises. The first was to Emma Kind that Avery would do her best to show the world that Victoria was innocent. The second was to Natalie Ratcliff that, in exchange for Natalie’s help, Avery would stay silent on the truth about Victoria’s disappearance. She had made good on both.

The Victoria Ford special was topped in the ratings only by Avery’s exposé on her father, the Thief of Manhattan. The two-part series covered the life of Claire Montgomery, aka Avery Mason, and detailed how Avery had worked with the FBI to track her father down and bring him to justice. During the negotiations on how Avery would deliver her father, she had insisted that the federal agents wear cameras and microphones. The body cam footage from the SWAT team as they crashed through the front door of the isolated, lonely cabin in the mountains of Lake Placid was something not to be missed. And no one did. Twenty-two million viewers tuned in to watch the episode. For Avery, the episode was cathartic on many fronts.