Who Gets to Tell It

By PERCIVAL HOOVER |

They keep calling this a “documentation project.”
That’s generous. It feels more like a surveillance upgrade.

Ever since the Council decided my cases require “public visibility,” I can’t move through Bellwick without assuming someone’s making notes — about me, my clients, my use of adjectives.
Yesterday, someone asked if their name would appear in Chapter Two.

It’s meant to “build public trust.”
In practice suspicion.

People behave differently when they think they’re being observed.
They stop talking freely. They curate their sentences.
Even witnesses rehearse now — as if truth has to pass quality control before it’s fit for printing.
That’s what this project is doing: turning a live town into a tidy paragraph.

The Ghostwriter Bloke tries to help.
He says he wants to capture my “voice.”
I told him to leave it where he found it.
To his credit, he has good taste in trainers.
Terrible in syntax, though.

G.B. asked me once what I hoped the book would achieve.
I said, accuracy.
He wrote down closure.
Not the same thing.

Chloe never asked to be part of a story.
She didn’t sign a release form.
She didn’t get to proofread the ending.
Whatever this British noir mystery turns into, she won’t read it.
But people will — and they’ll think they know what happened.
That’s the danger.

So I’ll be watching closely.
Every draft, every edit, every neat summary that forgets how messy it was.
They call it a psychological crime novel, but I call it evidence.
And evidence deserves better than edits.

If this is going to exist, it had better be right.
For Chloe.
And for everyone still pretending it wasn’t their fault.

— P.H.