12. The Deleted File #2
He braced both hands on the back of a chair, head bowed for one breath.
The tendons in his forearms stood out under the rolled edge of his coat cuff.
“I thought if I took it to Larkin first, made him understand I had it, he’d back off.
Resign. Whatever it took. Quietly. Evan wouldn’t have to get dragged through hearings, interviews, every asshole with a phone deciding what kind of victim he was. ”
“And did he?”
Noah laughed once, low and bitter. “No.”
“Of course not.”
“I know.”
She looked at him until he stopped saying it with his eyes too.
“When did you plan to tell me?” she asked.
His shoulders went rigid.
“That’s not rhetorical.”
He lifted his head. “I didn’t plan not to.”
“Interesting sentence construction.”
“Talia—”
“When?”
He stared at her like there might still be a version of this where honesty, belated and ugly, could count as salvage.
There wasn’t.
“When I had the drive,” he said at last. “And something more than one clip. Something that would hold.”
Her stomach turned.
Because there it was in full: not only concealment, but strategy. He had appointed himself custodian of truth. Gatekeeper. Decider of timing. Exactly the thing she had warned him about, exactly the thing he had sworn in quieter ways he was not doing with her.
“You let me sit across from you and talk about missing footage,” she said, each word precise. “You watched me build an investigation around a false premise.”
He pushed upright from the chair, guilt written plain now, no public smile left anywhere on him. “I was trying to keep Evan from being collateral.”
“You do not get to use the language of care to excuse obstruction.”
“I’m not excusing it.”
“You are, actually. Repeatedly.”
He took a step toward her. “I’m explaining why.”
“And I am telling you why does not save this.”
The distance between them was two feet and enormous.
She could smell cold air still trapped in his coat, the clean soap from a too-fast shower after the bus, the faint medicinal note of whatever he’d put on his hand.
Under different circumstances she would have known exactly how that nearness could alter a room.
Now it only made betrayal feel more intimate.
He dropped his gaze to the table. “I didn’t want you in the middle if it went bad.”
Something inside her went sharp.
“You did not want me informed enough to choose.”
His head came up.
“That is not protection, Noah. That is paternalism in a nice jacket.”
“That’s not fair.”
The protest came fast and quiet, the way real hits did.
She stepped closer anyway. “Fair? You want fair? Fair would have been giving me the material facts when you realized they implicated your program. Fair would have been respecting that my work is my work, not some dangerous little burden you could spare me from because you care.”
“It wasn’t about sparing you.”
“No? Then what was it about?”
He looked wrecked again. Younger somehow, despite the broad shoulders and the careful stillness. A man everyone trusted because he made himself useful, suddenly standing with nowhere to set the weight he had carried wrong.
“It was about the kid,” he said. “And maybe—” He broke off, jaw working. “Maybe also about believing I could handle one thing myself before it turned into a fire I couldn’t put out.”
There.
Private vulnerability behind the public image, raw and badly timed. Everyone wanted the smiling alternate captain. Only she had ever gotten this version—the exhausted man with his fear showing under the skin.
For one dangerous second, compassion moved.
She crushed it.
“Thank you for finally being honest,” she said. “Now let me return the courtesy. You did not handle it. You made it worse.”
He absorbed that as if he thought pain, taken cleanly, might function as penance.
“I know,” he said.
This time she believed him. It did not help.
“Do you still have the drive?”
A long pause. Then: “Yes.”
“Where?”
“At my apartment.”
“Bring it to me.”
His eyes lifted to hers, startled despite everything. “Now?”
“Yes, now.”
He hesitated.
And that hesitation—small, human, maybe practical, maybe fear—burned away the last soft edge in her.
“You are still doing it,” she said in disbelief. “You are still, right now, deciding whether to trust me with evidence in a case I am assigned to.”
“No.” He dragged a hand over his mouth. “I’m deciding whether handing it to you at two-thirty in the morning without counsel screws Evan harder if chain of custody gets challenged.”
The answer was smart. Infuriatingly smart.
Also not entirely wrong.
Talia hated that too.
She reached for her phone, pulled up a number from the board counsel contact list, and held his gaze while she pressed call.
He went very still.
A groggy voice answered on the fourth ring. “Shah?”
“Sorry to wake you, Mark. I have located a deleted athletics surveillance file relevant to the tutoring irregularities matter, currently in unauthorized private possession. I need immediate procedural guidance.”
Across from her, Noah’s face lost color.
Good, a mean part of her thought.
She turned slightly away while counsel woke all the way up and started asking clipped questions.
She gave only what was necessary: yes, she had confirmation of deletion; yes, she knew the identity of the user; yes, the file allegedly still existed in copied form; yes, she was with the individual now.
“No,” she said into the phone, eyes on Noah. “I am not alone in the building corridor-wise, and yes, I can remain in a public room. If campus security needs to meet us for transfer, that is acceptable.”
Noah shut his eyes.
By the time she ended the call, the seminar room felt colder despite the heat.
“Counsel is contacting campus security and compliance,” she said. “You are going to retrieve the drive. You are not opening it, altering it, or contacting anyone else first. We will transfer it on the record.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “You called security.”