Chapter 39 REID
REID
Elena Voss occupies the armchair across from Maya with the confidence of someone who has conducted interviews in war zones and living rooms and understands that the living rooms are more dangerous.
Recorder on the coffee table between them, a small black rectangle no larger than a phone, red light steady.
Notebook open on her knee. Pen held loosely.
She crossed her legs when she sat down and has not moved since.
Late morning light comes through the curtains. The house is quiet in the way houses go quiet when something consequential is happening inside them. Not silence but held breath.
Maya sits across from Voss on the sofa. Straight-backed. Hands in her lap, fingers laced. Her hair is down. She looks composed.
She is the bravest person I have ever met. I can only love her more for it if that is possible.
"Voss can be brutal." Owen's voice is low beside me.
He's leaning against the wall next to the kitchen doorway, arms folded, watching the two women.
"I've read her work. The Morrison-Hale series.
She took four months and seven sources to build that piece and by the time it was published there was nothing left to dispute. "
"Maya will be fine."
I glance at Adrian, who is standing near the bookshelves on the far wall, close enough to intervene, distant enough to be invisible.
His arms are at his sides, his posture unremarkable, and there is absolutely nothing unremarkable about his attention.
He is reading the journalist the way I read terrain, for what it conceals, not what it offers.
"My back is killing me," Jace mutters from the kitchen table behind us.
The last three nights were spent sleeping on the living room floor on sleeping bags.
None of us wanted to be separated a moment longer.
But, Maya didn’t want to leave her father’s side and we didn’t want to go back to the hotel without her.
So, sleeping bags on the floor seemed the only right thing to do.
Maya's father came downstairs the second morning, saw the three of us on his living room floor. Paused, but didn’t say anything about it and went to the kitchen. Only to come out with three cups of coffee that he left on the table before going back upstairs.
Ray Reeves is a man I understand.
"Maybe you should design more comfortable sleeping bags," Owen says, the corner of his mouth barely visible.
Jace opens his mouth to reply but Vivian reaches from behind him and swats his arm with the flat of her hand.
The gesture is so fast and so casual that it carries the authority of a woman who has managed unruly children and unruly husbands for decades and has never needed to raise her voice to do it.
"Shh," she says.
Jace closes his mouth. Ducks his head. Looks, for a fractional second, like a teenager caught talking in class.
In the living room, Voss begins.
"Let's start with what you're comfortable sharing." Her voice is even, modulated, carrying no warmth and no hostility. A professionally neutral instrument. "In your own words. The experience of discovering that intimate images of yourself had been distributed online without your consent."
Maya's hands tighten in her lap. I see the knuckles shift. Then she relaxes them deliberately and begins to speak, and her voice is steady.
She tells the truth the way Adrian prepared her for, drilled her on the perimeter, walked her through what to say and where to stop.
She describes the discovery. The mass email.
The profiles. The immediate, annihilating exposure.
She names Daniel as the "former partner" whose phone, unfortunately, was hacked.
Voss listens. Does not interrupt. Does not nod or soften her expression. Her pen moves occasionally. making quick, small marks.
"Let me ask you something directly," Voss says.
She sets her pen down. Folds her hands over the notebook.
"You chose to do this interview. You chose to use your real name.
You chose visibility. Most women in your position choose the opposite, and they have legitimate reasons for doing so. " A beat. "Why?"
Maya looks at her. Holds her gaze.
"Because I spent too long making myself invisible and it didn't protect me.
It didn't protect my family. It didn't protect those I love. Whoever did this operates in the space that shame creates. I want shame to change places.” Her voice is quiet and precise and carries through the room like a frequency.
“It shouldn’t be placed on the victims but on the perpetrators. "
Silence.
Voss picks up her pen. Writes for a long time. Maya sits. Doesn't fidget. Doesn't look at us.
The interview continues for another twenty minutes.
When Voss clicks the recorder off, the room exhales.
The held tension of fifty minutes in which one wrong sentence could have given Daniel's attorneys a foothold. I watch Maya's shoulders drop half an inch. Her hands unclench.
"I'll be in touch about the piece," Voss says. "My fact-checker will reach out separately for verification of the documentation you've shared."
Adrian crosses the room to us.
He stands in front of me. Hands in his pockets. His face is the same composed mask it always is, but something behind it has recalibrated.
"It went well," he says. Low enough that Maya, speaking with her mother across the room, doesn't hear. "Voss is thorough, she'll verify everything independently before publication. The piece will be solid."
"But?" Owen says.
Adrian looks at him. A beat.
"Daniel Hargrove.” Adrian adjusts a cufflink. "We've made him visible. He won't stay passive."
"What can we expect?" Jace asks.
"It’s unpredictable. This is the Atlantic Ledger. Elena Voss. The stakes for him are high." A pause. "I'll have contingencies in place. But you should understand that the moment that piece is published, the dynamic changes. We need to be prepared" He looks at me directly.
We have moved from a position of planning to a position of exposure, and exposure is not a condition I can manage by showing up and being consistent. It requires a different kind of readiness. The kind I haven't used since I left the Marines.