Chapter Twenty-Three
Sloane
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I told Mara everything in a conference room at nine in the morning with the blinds down, and it was the most humiliating, necessary hour of my professional life.
I told her about the tunnel and the truck and the diner and the hotel.
I told her I'd been holding the story partly for journalism and partly for a boy.
I told her there was a folder of photographs in the world designed to make my name mean the worst thing it can mean, and that they were real, the photos, the thing they implied was real—I had in fact fallen in love with a subject of my own investigation, and I'd hidden it from her, my editor, the person whose name was also going to be on this paper.
Mara listened with her hands flat on the table and didn't say a word until I was done. When I finished she sat back, and she didn't yell, which was worse.
"You understand," she said finally, "that I should pull you off this. Right now. Today. That every ethics seminar in the country would tell me to take this story and your byline and walk it across the street to the real paper and hand it to someone uncompromised."
"Yes."
"And you understand that the reason I'm not going to is not mercy.
It's because you're the only one who has the sourcing, the only one Reyes will talk to, the only one who has the documents, and if I bench you now we lose the story and Voss wins, and that is a worse outcome than a compromised reporter.
" She leaned forward. "So here's how it works, and there is no negotiating any part of it.
I co-byline. I read every word, twice. You do not get to protect him, and you do not get to crucify him—you treat Cade Lawson exactly the way you'd treat a stranger, which means: he is not a source, because you cannot use a man you're sleeping with as a source, that is the whole game over in one sentence.
Nothing he told you in private—nothing, Sloane, not one word he said to you in a bed—goes anywhere near this paper, ever, because that's not journalism, that's a betrayal wearing a press pass.
If his name comes up in someone else's account, it goes in or stays out on the same standard as anyone's. Are we clear?"
I felt something unknot in my chest that I hadn't known was strangling me.
"That's—" My voice did a thing. "That's exactly what I wanted to do and couldn't tell if I was allowed to. Protect him by leaving him out. Not as my boyfriend. As a person whose private medical history I happen to know and have no right to."
"It's not protecting him." Mara almost softened.
Almost. "It's protecting the story. The second you put one thing in here that came from pillow talk, you've handed Voss the discrediting move for free, you've made it exactly what they're already trying to say it is.
The story has to be so clean that the only thing left to attack is the truth itself.
Which means we go get it the hard way. On the record.
From people who choose it." She stood. "So go get me someone who'll say it with their name attached.
The documents are a grenade with the pin in.
I need a hand that isn't yours to pull it. "
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Theo called me from the hospital at noon.
I almost didn't pick up the unknown number. I'm so glad I did.
"It's Theo," he said. His voice was thick with whatever they had him on, but underneath it was something I hadn't heard from him before, something that had stopped being scared.
"Brooks. They put a rod in my leg. Titanium.
I'm gonna set off every metal detector for the rest of my life.
I've got a lot of time to think now, turns out, lying here. "
"Theo—I'm so—"
"Don't." Gentle. "I didn't call for that.
I called because I heard you and Cade—I heard a lot of things in the last day, the whole team's talking, it's all anyone's talking about.
And because I've been lying in this bed for a day replaying the part, weeks ago, where you bought me a coffee and asked how I actually was, and you were the first person in three years who did that without wanting me to play through it after.
" A breath, wet. "I want to go on the record.
With my name. All of it—the real report, the rewrite, the meeting they had scheduled for tomorrow that they don't need anymore because they got the leg instead, what they did to Reyes, what they've been doing to all of us.
I'm done. They took the season, they took the draft, they took my leg, and the one thing they don't get to take is the part where I finally say it out loud myself, in my own words, with my own name on it.
" His voice broke, and steadied, and it was the bravest thing I'd heard in months.
"I don't want to be the kid it happened to in your story, Sloane.
I've been the kid it happened to my whole life.
I want to be the guy who told the truth. Will you let me be that?"
I had to put the phone down for a second. I'm not ashamed of it.
"Yeah," I said, when I could. "Yeah, Theo. I'll let you be that."
And then Wes called, an hour later, because Theo had texted him, and Wes—the trainer who'd written recommend immediate cessation and been made to erase it, who'd been on his knees in the grass living inside his own buried sentence—said he had the original report.
The unaltered one. Saved on a personal drive they didn't know about, because some part of him had known, the whole time, that he'd need it someday.
He'd lose his job and maybe his license, and he was going to do it anyway, on the record, with his name, because—I became a trainer to keep kids safe, Sloane, and I have spent two years being paid to do the opposite, and I watched that boy's leg snap on a nothing Tuesday and I'm done.
I'm done being the gap between what I know and what I'm allowed to write.
By three in the afternoon I had two named sources, an original document, and a story that no lawyer on earth could call a girl with a grudge.
I had everything.
And I had left Cade Lawson out of every single word of it, protected, invisible, safe, the way I'd wanted to and hadn't been sure I was allowed to—and I sat in that newsroom with the truest story of my life coming together around me and felt, underneath the adrenaline, completely and totally alone, because the one person I wanted to tell was the one person I'd built the whole thing to keep out of it.
He came in at four. I should have known Voss would send him poisoned.
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He didn't have the wall up. That was the first thing, the thing that scared me. He had something worse—a hurt so raw it had eaten through the wall entirely, and a wounded man with no wall is more dangerous than a calm one, because he's all exposed nerve and no governor.
"You're writing it," he said. Not a question.
"Right now. Today. I had to hear it from Voss, Sloane.
He called me into his office and told me my—he said my girlfriend is putting my injury in the paper.
That you're naming me. That you got close to me to get the story, the whole season, and now you're going to print the thing I told you in your bed—the back, the Toradol, all of it—with my name on it, and end my draft, and that the only reason he's telling me is so I can protect myself before you do it to me.
" His voice cracked straight down the middle.
"Tell me that's not true. Tell me I didn't—tell me the one time in my entire life I let somebody all the way in, she wasn't taking notes the whole time. "
And there it was. The single most effective thing Voss could possibly have done, and he'd done it without breaking a sweat: he'd taken the one wound Cade had—you're only safe if you're never seen—and he'd told him that the girl who saw him was using what she saw to destroy him.
He'd turned the most vulnerable night of Cade's life into evidence against itself.
He'd made being loved feel like being robbed.
"It's not true," I said. Steady. Even though it gutted me.
"I left you out. Every word. Nothing you told me in private is anywhere near this story, and it never will be, because I'm a reporter, Cade, a real one, and a real one does not print pillow talk.
Mara won't even let me—your name isn't in it.
Your injury isn't in it. I protected you, you absolute—I protected you when you'd already left me, when you'd already half-taken the deal, I sat in that newsroom and built a wall around you in the middle of tearing theirs down, because it was the right thing and because I love you and I couldn't even tell which one was doing the building. "
"Then show me." His eyes were wild. "Show me the draft. Right now. If I'm not in it, show me, prove it, let me read it."
"I can't." And God, I heard how it sounded the second it left my mouth.
"Cade, I can't, I can't show a subject of an investigation the unpublished—it's not mine, it's Mara's too, it's the paper's, there are rules, and I know, I know how it sounds, it sounds exactly like trust me, just trust me, which is the thing I've spent this whole story screaming at you never to fall for—"
"So I'm just supposed to believe you." He laughed, and it was the ugliest sound I'd ever heard him make, all his father in it, every brick.
"After everything. I'm supposed to take it on faith that the girl investigating my team, who's about to publish, who can't show me what she wrote, didn't put me in it.
You want me to do the exact thing you screamed at me for asking you to do.
Stay quiet. Trust the person with the power. Just until it's safe."
"That is not the same and you know it—"
"Is it not?" He stepped closer, and for one terrible second I didn't recognize him—the kid was nowhere, it was all wound and wall and his father's cold and Voss's poison, distilled.
"Because from where I'm standing, you've got a folder that ends me, and you're asking me to trust you, and the only difference between you and Voss is which one of you I was stupid enough to fall in love with. "
The room went silent.
He heard it. I watched him hear it, watched the horror of it land on his own face a half-second after it left his mouth, watched him reach for it to take it back—
—and not be able to. There's no take-back on a sentence like that. It's the one thing about sentences I know better than anyone.
"Get out," I said. Quiet. The work voice.
The one with the whole ocean of hurt underneath it that I would not, would not, would not let him see.
"Go run your circles. Go take your deal.
Go let Voss tell you who I am, since you'd rather hear it from him than from me.
" I turned back to my screen, my hands shaking, the truest story of my life glowing in front of me with his name nowhere in it, with a wall built around him out of my own restraint. "I have a paper to put out."
He stood there for a long moment.
Then he left, again, the second time in two days, and this time he didn't say he couldn't watch me burn.
This time he was the one holding the match.
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