CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"I've got nine names," Sloane said, unwrapping her first taco as she looked down to her phone. "Fresh Horizons graduates from the same cohort window as Carol and Donna, or close to it.”
“That’s all from the Facebook page for graduates?” Kate asked.
“It is. This thing is a treasure trove.”
The taco truck was parked at the edge of a small lot two blocks from the office, beside a metal picnic table that had seen better decades.
Kate had driven past it a dozen times without really even noticing it.
Sloane had been the one to suggest it, which surprised her, and then she remembered that Sloane was probably a practical person about lunch in ways that Kate was not.
The afternoon was cool but clear, and there was something almost forcibly pleasant about sitting outside with a paper-wrapped taco in your hand while the city went about its business around you.
Kate had ordered two—one carnitas, one potato with salsa verde—and was working through the first one while Sloane sorted through the list on her phone.
"Well, seven of them had working phone numbers,” Slone said. “Two didn't."
"Start with whoever looks easiest to reach," Kate said.
Sloane made the first call. The woman answered on the second ring, and they put the phone on the table between them. They both reluctantly put their tacos down as they spoke.
The woman’s name was Janet Howe. She'd completed the Fresh Horizons program about fourteen months ago, she told them.
She sounded measured and willing to talk, and when Sloane explained they were following up on a matter related to the program, she didn't ask for details or push back.
She said the program had been good for her, genuinely.
It had helped her rebuild some of the confidence she'd lost over the course of a long, deflating marriage.
She spoke about Richard Hale with a measured appreciation—not gushing by any means, but without a single, negative word.
When they finished, Sloane thanked her and ended the call, reclaiming their tacos.
"Nothing there," Sloane said.
Kate was halfway through her first taco as she nodded agreement.
The second call was to a man named Rob Felton, who had been briefly in the program with his ex-wife as a condition of their counseling before their split had become final.
He'd only attended four sessions before they stopped going together.
He had nothing unpleasant to report. He'd found it professional and thought it had genuinely helped his ex-wife even after he'd stopped attending.
He seemed faintly embarrassed to be speaking with federal agents and Kate was not unsympathetic.
She told him he'd been very helpful and Sloane ended the call.
"He seemed like a sweet guy," Sloane said, reaching for her second taco. “And also… not a single bad word about the program.”
Kate looked out at the street for a moment. A delivery driver was unloading something from a van across the lot. She watched him for a second and then looked back down at her food. “Who’s next?” she asked.
“Already on it,” Sloane said. “Brenda Castro.”
Brenda Castro made yet more statements and little quips that were in line with everything they’d heard so far.
She continued to paint the Fresh Horizons program as a well-run, professionally organized operation that had helped her find her footing.
Brenda spoke warmly about the group sessions, about the women she'd met there, and about the sense of community the program built around something that could otherwise feel very isolating.
She'd made two friends she still kept in touch with.
Sloane scrolled to the fourth name.
"Gloria Tran," she said. "No employer listed in the file. Phone number's a cell." She dialed while chewing down the last of her final taco.
The line rang five times, and Kate had nearly written it off when the call connected.
"Hello?" a woman’s hurried voice said.
"Ms. Tran? Gloria Tran?”
“Yes, that’s me. Who is this?”
“This is Special Agent Sloane with the FBI. I'm here with a colleague, Agent Wise. We're calling in connection with Fresh Horizons. We were hoping to ask you a few questions about your experience with the program if you have the time."
There was a slight pause from the other end, maybe just a beat too long to feel normal. "What kind of questions?"
“Oh, just about your time there," Sloane said. "What the experience was like. Whether you completed the program, that sort of thing."
There was another pause before Gloria said, "I didn't finish it.” She almost snapped the answer at them. "I left partway through."
Kate set the last of her second taco down on the paper wrap and looked at Sloane.
"Can you tell us a bit about why you left?" Sloane asked.
There was a quiet on the line that felt almost electric.
Kate was expecting some sort of pushback or, at the very least, for Gloria to ask for proof that they were agents.
But when Gloria spoke again, her voice was lower and more deliberate.
"I'm not trying to make it into something bigger than it was," she said. "I want to be upfront about that."
"We appreciate that," Kate said.
"There was one session in particular," Gloria said.
"It was private coaching, one-on-one with Hale.
Not a group session. I'd been sharing things with him—personal things, about my marriage…
about some specific situations that had happened as it was going on.
" She stopped briefly, and Kate heard the slight tightening in her voice.
"A few weeks later, I'm in group and Hale is doing this exercise with us where he walks through these anonymous case studies.
He explains them as composite examples, things to help the group think through certain patterns.
And he starts describing one, and…" She sighed, but Kate was pretty sure she could hear some anger to it.
"It was me. The details were changed enough that no one else in the room would have known, but I knew.
The specific situation, the way it was framed, certain phrases I had actually used.
It was me. He was using me as an example. "
Kate took her phone out and started typing up the notes. This was the first thing they’d heard about Hale or Fresh Horizons that hadn’t been completely glowing.
"I didn't say anything at the time," Gloria continued.
"I went home and thought about it for a week, and then I decided I didn't want to keep going.
So, I left. Now, I know what he did wasn't illegal or anything, but… I don’t know.
Even though he changed enough details, it felt like an invasion, you know?
He could call it a composite or an example or whatever he wanted and probably no one would ever prove otherwise. "
"But you felt certain," Sloane said.
"I felt completely certain." There was no heat in it, just a flat, tired clarity.
"And the thing that stuck with me was that if he did it with my material, he probably did it with others.
How much of what we told him in private actually stayed private?
It was a question I kept coming back to and I… well, I genuinely don't know."
None of them said anything for a moment. On the street behind Kate, a car slowed and then accelerated. A phone rang somewhere nearby and went unanswered. A new customer to the taco truck was laughing about something.
"Ms. Tran," Kate said, "you disclosed something personal in an individual session with Hale, and then heard that same material presented to the group as a case study. Is that what we’re hearing?"
"Yes."
"And Hale never acknowledged it? Never approached you afterward?"
"Never," Gloria said. "I don't think he knew I realized it.”
“Do you think that was arrogance or ignorance?” Sloane asked.
“Maybe a bit of both. He acted completely normally toward me for the two weeks between that session and when I quit.
He probably assumed I hadn't put it together.
" She looked between them, shaking her head slowly.
"Look, I thought about reporting it to a life coaching certification board.” She chuckled in a dry, humorless sound. “But in the end, I just left."
"We appreciate you being so candid," Sloane said. "This is genuinely helpful."
“Is something going on with them?” she asked. “Are they under investigation?”
“I’m afraid we can’t share that sort of information, Ms. Tran. But we do appreciate you taking the time to speak with us.”
“Oh, ok. Sure.”
They thanked her again and ended the call.
Kate looked down at the remnants of her lunch.
The paper wrapping had gone a little translucent with grease and she folded it over on itself without thinking about it.
Sloane was sitting back on the bench with her hands around her soda cup, looking at the table.
"It's not a crime," Sloane said, after a moment.
“Maybe not,” Kate said. "But it means Hale had access to deeply personal information about women in vulnerable situations, and he was not as careful with it as he led them to believe."
Sloane nodded slowly. "And if he was willing to use what was shared in private sessions in a room full of people, even anonymized, then the question of what else he might have done with that information becomes a real one.
And so…if someone in that program had access to Carol and Donna's names, their patterns, their routines—that could have come from inside the group. "
“And maybe from the sort of people who may know details such as when someone leaves their backdoor unlocked,” Kate added.
She thought about the online forum, still open in a tab on her laptop back at the office.
The posts and the profile pictures and the private messages between members.
Hale had handed over the administrator login without blinking, sitting across from them in that carefully considered office.
His willingness to give them access to everything had read as transparency.
It still might be but now, given what they’d just heard, maybe there was more to it.
But Gloria Tran's quiet account of sitting in a circle and hearing her own private story offered back to her had opened up something Kate had been circling without fully realizing it.
The program was not simply a place where two victims had once overlapped.
It was a place where a man had gathered extremely personal disclosures and retained control over who saw them and how they were used.
That was worth noting.
"I mean, is this enough to go back and question Hale again?” Sloane asked
“Not yet, I don’t think," Kate said. “But it does make me wonder what these people are signing themselves up for when they join. Maybe we can figure that out back at the office.”
Sloane looked up from the coffee cup and gave a short, single nod. She had already picked up her phone to make the next call on the list.
Kate gathered the paper wrappings from their lunch and stood to find a trash can.
The afternoon light was warm and bright.
She was glad for the half hour of tacos and the two plastic chairs, but now it was time to get back to the sterile environment of a field office conference room—which was surprisingly another part of the job she was starting to miss.