Chapter Seven
Sloane
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I am very good at not thinking about things.
It's a professional skill. You cannot do this job if every horror you uncover gets to live rent-free in your chest, so you learn to file things—put them in a drawer, close the drawer, work the next angle—and I had spent four years becoming a person who could file almost anything.
I could not file the kiss.
It kept coming open. I'd be three sentences into a records request and there it would be, the gray hoodie, the careful hands, the way he'd pushed the hair off my face like I was something breakable, and I'd lose the thread entirely and have to start the paragraph over.
I wrote DON'T FALL FOR THE WALL, PIERCE on my whiteboard in letters big enough to shame myself with, and then I stood there and looked at it and understood, with the particular clarity I usually reserve for other people's denial, that I had already fallen, that the whiteboard was not a warning, it was a tombstone, and the thing it marked the death of was my ability to do this story with clean hands.
So I did the only honest thing available to a dishonest situation. I worked harder.
If I was going to be compromised—and I was, I knew I was, I'd kissed a subject of my own investigation against a desk and ruined two days of notes doing it—then the work had to be so airtight that no one, including me, could ever say the compromise touched it.
I would not let what I felt for Cade Lawson put one fingerprint on the reporting.
That became the rule before there was a rule.
The story would be clean even if I wasn't.
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The thread I was pulling that week was the document.
The tip had reframed it for me—ask what he signed—and I'd spent days learning the unglamorous truth of investigative work, which is that it's mostly about understanding paper.
Where it's generated. Who signs it. Where it goes to die.
A medical-hardship scholarship withdrawal isn't a secret kept in someone's head; it's a form, and forms exist in systems, and systems leave tracks even when the people running them are careful.
So I learned the systems. I sat in the financial aid office pretending to be confused about my own (very real, very depressing) aid package, and I watched how the counselors pulled up records, and which screens they turned away from me, and I learned the name of the office that processes athletic scholarship changes, and I learned that it routes through exactly one administrator, and I learned—this was the part that made my hands go still on the fake forms—that the administrator's calendar, which a work-study kid showed me without understanding what he was showing me, had a recurring closed block every other Thursday afternoon, labeled only Athletics — D.M.
D.M. Dale Mercer. A recurring closed block, every other Thursday, going back years, hidden in plain sight in a registrar's scheduling system, Athletics — D.M.
I didn't know yet what happened in those Thursday afternoons behind that always-closed door.
But I knew where, and I knew who, and I knew it had a recurrence—which meant it wasn't an accident or an incident.
It was a routine. You don't put a tragedy on a repeating calendar invite. You put a practice there.
I didn't have the documents yet. But I had the room now, and the time, and the man, and that's how a story comes together—not all at once, but the way a photograph develops, the shape arriving before the detail, until one day you're looking at a picture you can't unsee.
I took it to Mara. She looked at my notes and said the thing she always said, it's not enough, and she was right, it wasn't, a calendar block isn't proof of a crime, but she also said, quieter, tapping the D.M.
, "But it's a thread. And threads, when you pull them right, are attached to things.
Keep pulling. Carefully." She tapped the calendar block one more time, the D.M.
under her fingernail. "This is the one, Sloane.
Twenty years in, I can still feel it when it's the one.
Don't let anybody charm you or scare you off it. "
I'd said nothing. I'd filed it. The drawer was getting full of things I couldn't file.
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Brielle staged an intervention over pad thai that I saw coming from a mile away and walked into anyway, because part of me wanted to be caught.
"You've reorganized the spice rack twice this week," she said, pointing at me with a chopstick.
"You only do that when there's a thing you're not saying.
Last time it was the housing story. The time before that it was when you found out your dad remarried off Instagram.
The spice rack is your tell, Sloane, it has been since freshman year, and it is alphabetized right now, which means whatever this is, it's a big one.
" She set the chopstick down. "You don't have to tell me.
I'm not your mom and I'm not your editor.
I'm just gonna sit here and love you and eat your spring rolls, and whenever you're ready, I'm ready.
But I'm noticing. For the record. I notice you. "
"I notice you" is the most Brielle sentence there is.
It's how she says I love you. And I almost told her, right there, over the pad thai, the whole thing—the tunnel and the truck and the gray hoodie and the rooftop—and I didn't, because telling Brielle would make it real, and real meant I'd have to look at what I was doing, which was falling in love with the exact wrong person at the exact wrong time in a way that could end the career I'd bled for.
"It's a big story," I said, which was true, and a dodge, and Brielle let me have it, because she's family, and family lets you keep the door closed until you're ready to open it.
"Okay," she said. "But when the big story has a jawline, you come find me. I have a lot of opinions and a bottle of wine and zero judgment." She grinned. "Also your spice rack is beautiful. Genuinely. You should be a stress-cleaner professionally."
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I texted him to the roof because the work had cracked open something I needed to not be alone with.
I'd spent the afternoon staring at Athletics — D.M.
on my screen, understanding that a recurring calendar block meant this wasn't a tragedy, it was a practice, a routine, a thing they'd built into the rhythm of the institution like a standing lunch—and somewhere in there the weight of it had gotten too big to file, the every-other-Thursday-for-years of it, all the boys who'd walked into that room not knowing it had a recurrence, and I'd needed, suddenly and badly, to not be the only person who could see the shape of it.
So I took him to the roof, where you can see the whole map, because I thought maybe a man who'd spent his life in the hallways had never been shown how the pieces fit, and because—I'll be honest, since I'm being honest about all of it—because I wanted to see him by city-light with no recorder and no story between us, just once, just to know what that was like.
And it was good. That was the problem. It was so good.
Sitting on a cold HVAC unit with his shoulder against mine and the whole campus lit up below us, telling him things I didn't tell anyone, watching him relax one degree at a time like a fist slowly opening—it was the first time in years I'd felt like a person instead of a function.
He told me he'd decided to stop. I told him I'd decided the same.
We were both such liars, and we kissed under the cold sky anyway, and I felt the thing my mother warned me about—the softening, the wanting, the way a woman can lose the edge of herself in a man—and for once I couldn't make myself afraid of it.
That scared me more than the calendar did.
Because here's what I knew, sitting on that roof with my hand in his: I knew that Athletics — D.M.
was a thread attached to something that could break this whole program, and I knew that the man whose hand I was holding was, in some way I didn't fully understand yet, part of that program's machine—the enforcer, Voss's guy, the wall they sent to make problems quiet—and I knew that the story I was building and the boy I was falling for were not two separate things.
They were the same thing, seen from two sides.
And one day, I understood, looking out at the dark stadium, I was going to have to choose which side I was reporting from.
I just didn't know yet how much it would cost.
I walked home that night with my edge intact and my heart in trouble, which is the most dangerous combination there is, and I added a line to my whiteboard under the tombstone:
The room is real. Every other Thursday. He's part of it. Don't forget that, even up on the roof. Especially up on the roof.
Then I stood there and looked at it and knew I'd already forgotten it, up on the roof, with his shoulder against mine.
The work would stay clean. I'd make sure of that.
I just wasn't sure anymore that I could.
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