Chapter 32
MAYA
They're waiting for me.
Reid is standing by the window, arms crossed. Owen is in his desk chair, turned to face the room, glasses off, hands flat on the armrests. Jace is leaning against the edge of my desk and he hasn't let go of my hand since we walked into the office.
My sketchpad is where I left it two days ago. The pencil cup. The tablet, screen dark. Evidence of a life I was building.
I pull my hand free from Jace's. I need to be standing on my own.
Three men. Three sets of eyes. Reid's blue-green, steady as geography. Owen's pale blue, quiet and deep in a way I've never been able to get to the bottom of. Jace's, still red-rimmed, watching me with intentional focus.
I open my mouth. Close it.
My hands are wringing each other. Standing here, with the weight of three gazes and the knowledge that in a few minutes they will look at me differently, every word has evaporated and what's left is a woman with shaking hands and a dry throat and no idea how to begin.
"It's okay, sweetheart." Reid's says low and unhurried. "Take your time. We're here."
The gentleness nearly breaks me before I start.
I swallow. Try again.
"Have you ever googled me?"
Confusion moves through the room. I can watch it cross each face in sequence. Jace's brow furrows. Reid's head tilts. Owen's expression doesn't change, but something behind his eyes sharpens.
"Why would we google you?" Owen asks knowing already that there is no good answer to that question. "Maya. Just tell us what's happening."
I shake my head. The words are in my chest but the path between my chest and my mouth is blocked by something dense and heavy, something that has been sitting on my lungs for months, and I cannot move it by talking around it.
"Please," I say. "Google my name. Maya Reeves. And then I'll explain."
A beat. Owen looks at Reid. Reid gives the smallest nod. Owen turns to his desk, opens his laptop, and the blue-white glow of the screen fills the space between us.
I watch his fingers type. Pressing enter. The results load.
I stand on the other side of the desk. I cannot see the screen. I can only see their faces.
Owen's eyes move across the results. Left to right, scanning, the systematic sweep of a man who reads data for a living. His expression is neutral. Clinical. He's reading headlines, I think. The profiles.
He clicks something.
The neutrality cracks. A hairline fissure, across the composure. His jaw sets. His lips press together. His hand on the trackpad goes completely still.
Reid, behind Owen's right shoulder, is looking at the screen. I watch his face and I see him flinch. He doesn't look away from the screen. But his hand finds the back of Owen's chair and grips it, and the knuckles go white.
Jace is behind Owen's left shoulder and he's leaned forward and I watch the sequence happen in real time.
Confusion. why are there photos of Maya on the internet?
Focus. The images registering as what they are.
And then something shifts in his posture.
Subtle. The shoulders pull back. The chin drops.
The easy, kinetic energy that defines him goes absolutely still.
Silence.
The room is so quiet I can hear the laptop's fan. I can hear my own breathing, thin and shallow, and I can hear the wind outside and the creak of the cabin settling and the specific absence of human sound that happens when three people are shocked.
I dig my nails into my palms. Press hard. Anchor.
"Is this— " Jace's voice is wrong. Stripped of everything recognizable. "Is that actually you, or is it some AI bullshit?"
I nod.
I try to speak but my throat has closed around the words and I'm standing here nodding like a broken machine and I can feel the tears threatening and I will not cry, not yet, not before I've said what I need to say.
I breathe. One inhale, held, released.
"His name is Daniel Hargrove," I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else.
The recitation voice of a woman who has told this story to police officers and lawyers and a therapist and is now telling it one final time to the only people whose reaction actually matters.
"He's a corporate attorney in Los Angeles. We were together for fourteen months."
I look at my hands instead of their faces.
"He was my first… " I stop. Start over. "I hadn't been with anyone before him. Not really. And I thought… "
"You don't have to explain that," Reid says. No judgment in it, just a line drawn.
I nod. But I do have to explain it, because the why matters and the why is that I was twenty-five and he was twelve years older and he told me the photos were for when he missed me and I believed him because I was in love and love made me stupid.
Stupid in the specific way of someone who has never had a reason to distrust their own judgment and so doesn't know what it sounds like when someone is building a cage out of affection.
"I sent him photos," I say. "Voluntarily. He asked and asked and I… finally did it."
The shame is a physical thing. Heat rising from my collarbones to my jaw.
"He was controlling. Small things at first, then not small. I ended it."
"Good," The word is clipped, hard, the Jace version of approval.
"He told me if I left he'd put the photos online." I'm looking at the wall behind Owen's head now. The grain of the wood. I count the knots. "I didn't believe he would actually do it."
Nobody speaks. The silence has a different quality now. The braced anticipation of people who can see where a story is heading and are choosing to stay in the room for the impact.
"I was a kindergarten art teacher. There was a Christmas party.
Faculty, parents, kids." I am in the school gymnasium now, in my memory, and the sensory details are not something I'm choosing to recall.
They're arriving on their own, unbidden, the way trauma memory works, not chronological but environmental.
The smell of sugar cookies and tempera paint.
The paper snowflakes the kids made, hanging from the ceiling with fishing line.
The specific pitch of children's laughter layered over adult conversation. "Everyone's phones went off."
I stop. The air in the office feels thicker.
My hands are fists at my sides. My nails are cutting crescents into my palms and I can feel the sting and the sting is useful, it is something to organize sensation around.
"I could hear the sound. That notification sound.
Over and over. And people were looking at their phones and then looking at me and the— "
My voice gives out.
I breathe. The room waits.
"They weren't just the photos I'd sent him." The words are coming faster now, tumbling, the dam cracking. "He'd recorded me. Without me knowing about it. In the shower. When we were… " I gesture vaguely, uselessly. "He angled the camera so his face never showed—"
"Maya." Reid stops my rambling. I look up. His face is absolutely still. "You don't have to rush this."
But I do. Because if I stop I won't start again.
"I was fired." I say it simply. "They said I wasn't suitable to be around children. They didn’t even let me say goodbye."
Jace makes the sound of a man whose body has reacted before his mind can intervene. He pushes off the desk and takes two steps toward the window and turns back and his face is filled with rage.
"He didn't stop," I say. "He created fake dating profiles.
With my name, my photos, my phone number, my address.
The descriptions said I… " I swallow against the nausea that rises every time.
"That I was into things I'm not into. That liked to be forced to…
Men came to my apartment," I say. "Strange men.
At my door. Calling me names I—" I stop.
I'm shaking. I didn't realize until now but my whole body is vibrating, a low-grade tremor that starts in my hands and extends to my shoulders and I press my arms against my sides to contain it.
"I moved. Changed my number. He found out.
It started again. I moved again. And Again. "
"Did you go to the police?" Owen asks.
"I filed a report. Pressed charges. He is a lawyer, he has connections, money, the kind that buys better attorneys than the DA's office can field.
" The bitterness in my voice is something I can't scrub out and I don't try.
"They brought him in. He said his phone was hacked.
That he wasn't responsible for the distribution.
That he understood my frustration but I should have been more careful because…
" I recite it from memory, the exact words, because they have been living in my head for months rent-free, " 'nothing dies on the internet. ' "
"Fuck," Jace swears.
"I couldn't prove it was him. The photos I sent voluntarily muddied the case.
The DA declined to prosecute. I gave up because the alternative was my mental health and I'd already lost my job, my apartment, my dignity in front of every parent and colleagues and I didn't have anything left to spend on a fight I couldn't win. "
I run out of words.
Not gradually. Abruptly. Like a tap turning off. I've said everything. Every piece of it. The worst thing that's ever happened to me is now in this room with these three men and I am standing on the other side of a desk. Just standing here. Waiting.
The silence stretches.
Jace reaches me first.
He doesn't speak. He wraps both arms around me and pulls me against his chest and holds me there with a grip that doesn't ask anything and doesn't offer platitudes and doesn't pretend this is fixable with a hug. Just holds.
"If you want to fight him," Jace says, into my hair, "we will fight him. I don't care what it costs. I don't care how long it takes. If you want him to answer for this, we will make him answer."
I shake my head against his shirt. "I can't. He has resources I can't match. Connections. Lawyers. He's untouchable."
Jace pulls back. Just enough so he can look me in the eyes.
"Maya," he says. "We also have resources” He takes a deep breath in and says the most unexpected thing. “We own True North."
The words don't register. I blink.
"The company." He says it plainly. Matter-of-fact. "Reid and Owen and me. We built it. We own it."
I look at Reid. He meets my eyes. Nods once.
I look at Owen. Owen is looking at the laptop screen. He hasn't closed it. His face has the same careful blankness I saw in my colleague's expression at the Christmas party.
"And we are in the process of a major capital injection," Jace continues. "We're talking about significant resources. Enough to make Daniel Hargrove's legal team look like a public defender's office."
I can't process this. The dissonance between the men I know and what Jace is telling me is so vast that my brain simply stalls, caught between the before and the after like a gear that can't find the next tooth.
And then Owen's voice with the precision of a scalpel.
"The deal will not hold. There's a morality clause."