Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
Bram
The kitchen smelled like all four of us by the time Cillian found the first piece.
Cedar in the tea towels. Sandalwood soaked into the kitchen he had barely left in three days.
My own peppercorn on the counters where I’d stood and cooked and put out fires while the woman upstairs rebuilt her body from the inside.
And under all of it, chamomile and honey, gone into the walls now, the baseline of the whole house.
Sloane had left hours ago. Cillian sat cross-legged on the floor tile, laptop on one knee, three browser windows throwing blue light across the sound-wave ink on his forearms. He had surrendered the table to legal files, so he was on the floor.
“The liaison opened the shared drive fourteen times in six weeks,” he said.
He didn’t look up. His voice was flat, the way it got when he was reading me numbers and didn’t want me arguing with the numbers.
“First time was two days after they put him on the project. He pulled the full technical rider, the booth schematics, and the biometric monitoring protocols.”
I had Sloane’s solicitor’s email already drafted on my own screen, waiting on the one attachment that would make it worth sending.
“Fourteen’s too many,” I said. “A liaison does an initial review and a couple of milestone checks. Three. Four if he’s thorough.”
“It’s worse than too many.” His fingers moved.
A spreadsheet opened, color-coded, timestamps running down the left in his own shorthand.
“Seven of the fourteen happened between midnight and four in the morning. Network office hours stop at six. Whoever pulled these was doing it where the standard logs don’t look. ”
“The overnight stuff won’t hit the weekly audit,” I said. “Automated monitoring only flags business-hours anomalies.”
“Which is why he picked those hours.” He turned the laptop toward me. Every access point mapped, every file named, duration down to the second. “Fifty-three minutes on the biometric spec alone. That document lays out exactly which vitals I track and how the data feeds the audio chain.”
I read it. Red for the technical rider, blue for the schematics, green for what he’d labeled BIO-MON specs. The thing about the pattern was how careful it was. Nobody doing oversight takes notes like that. That’s somebody building a case.
“This isn’t the liaison.”
Cillian’s eyes came up. The silver in his ears caught the light.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
Someone had borrowed the liaison’s login.
He found the second machine later that night. Same credential, different IP. The liaison ran a network-issued laptop with a hardware signature you could set your watch by. This second device was personal. Cheap. The kind of thing a production assistant carries in a backpack between sets.
“Jamie Okafor,” Cillian said.
The name landed wrong in my stomach. Not a strategy. Not a faceless corporate hand. A kid with a lanyard, who’d stood in rooms where Isobel drank her tea and held together the fiction that was keeping her employed and, some days, alive.
I knew the face. Young, eager, one of the junior PAs who moved equipment and handed out scripts. Eight months on the crew. Long enough to learn the routine. Long enough to stop being someone anyone looked at.
But the network had only made him liaison six weeks ago. Six weeks with credentials, access to the shared drive, and a reason to turn everything he already knew into a report.
“His contract,” I said. “Pull it.”
He already had it open. Standard PA agreement, boilerplate, nothing wrong with any of it except one clause buried in the supplementary terms that I’d have skimmed right past on a normal read.
A loyalty provision. Paragraph 14(c), subsection iii.
The Assistant agrees to provide the Network with any information relevant to the commercial viability or reputational risk of the Production, including but not limited to matters pertaining to the health, conduct, or personal circumstances of key creative personnel.
Broad enough to cover anything. Narrow enough that reporting on her biology wasn’t just allowed. It was the job.
“He didn’t pick this,” Cillian said. Flat again, just laying out the variable. “It was baked into his employment terms. They hired him to watch.”
“They hired him to watch her.”
“Yes.”
I shut the laptop and set it on the tile. Pressed both palms flat to the cold floor and breathed in through my nose, all of it, and under all of it the honey that wouldn’t leave the walls now.
Somebody had sat in our production meetings.
Handed her scripts with a smile. Watched her manage the booth heat, watched her dose suppressants in the green room between segments, watched Cillian put himself between her and every door that could open on the wrong person, and written all of it down, all of it, for the people now using it to take her career apart.
Eight months embedded in the crew. Six weeks with the access to turn observation into evidence.
“The biometric data,” I said. My voice came out level. The work voice, not a mask, just the tool the next part of the job needed. “Did he get into your monitoring logs?”
“He couldn’t.” His jaw tightened. First crack in him all night. “The feed runs through my private server. Encrypted. Air-gapped off the production network. He could read the spec for what I track. Not the readings.” A beat. “So he knew I was watching her vitals. He just couldn’t prove why.”
“But the spec on its own was enough for the filing.”
“More than enough.” The sandalwood off him went sharp at the edges.
“The filing says the production knew a biological event was possible and didn’t put safeguards in place.
So my monitoring system becomes proof we knew, not proof we protected her.
Six years I spent building that to keep her safe, and they’re using it to argue we put her in danger. ”
Through the ceiling I could hear her moving.
Fabric being arranged, set down, moved again.
The nesting drive Sloane had described, running full out.
Tuck was up there too. Not helping, just there.
Close enough that his cedar was available for whatever she was building, close enough to hold the door without anyone asking.
I thought about Jamie Okafor. Twenty-three.
Eight months on a crew. A clause that turned watching into his contract and his contract into this.
There’s a particular cruelty in writing the surveillance into the work itself, so clean the kid doing it might not understand the whole shape of what he was handing over until the day they used it.
And I thought about her finding out. That somebody she’d shared a sealed booth with for eight months, who’d handed her scripts and fixed her microphone, had been documenting her body for the people who wanted everything she’d built.
Getting outed to millions of strangers was a broadcast. One catastrophic minute you could put on a timeline, bracket, contain. The world heard the whine, the world drew its line, and the world moved on to the next person’s three seconds of private truth.
This was different. Being watched, for months, by someone whose presence she’d let into the most exposed space there is and never once questioned.
You can’t put that on a timeline, because it didn’t happen at a point.
It happened the whole time. Every nice exchange retroactively poisoned.
Every moment she’d felt safe, actually being filed.
I knew what that would do to her.
Years I’d watched her do the constant, grinding work of hiding without even realizing the extent of it.
The suppressant schedule. The scent spray.
Every interaction adjusted to head off exactly this.
It cost her, and the cost showed, in the circles she buried under oversized glasses and the vocal fatigue she blamed on long sessions and the way she walked into every room already reading it for the person who might see through her.
She’d spent eleven years watching everyone. Finding out that someone had been watching her, on purpose, under contract, would get into whatever trust she was just starting to rebuild and shake the footings.
I couldn’t stop that. Couldn’t manage the impact or build some frame around her that would soak up the hit before it reached her.
What I could do was make sure that when it landed, the evidence was finished, the legal strategy held, and the pack around her had already done every piece of work there was to do.
So the only thing left for her to carry was the feeling.
Everything else, the documentation, the counter-filing, the response, would already be standing.
I opened the laptop again.
“Walk me through the whole access timeline,” I said. “Every file. Every timestamp. Every place his drive activity lines up with our production schedule.”
Cillian turned the screen back to himself and started.
We worked deep into the night.
The timeline came together like it had been sitting there waiting.
Okafor had hit the shared drive inside twenty-four hours of every major milestone.
After the technical rehearsal. After the press conference.
After each script revision. He pulled an updated technical rider every time Cillian changed the booth spec.
He pulled the production schedule six times, cross-referencing it, presumably, against whatever reporting setup the network had him on.
The midnight sessions were the worst of it.
In three of them he’d opened files that had nothing to do with a PA’s job.
Cillian’s engineering specs. My narrative structure documents.
Isobel’s vocal warm-up protocols. He sat with them long enough that it was reading, not browsing.
Somebody had told him what to look for. Somebody had handed him a list.