Chapter Eleven
Sloane
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The documents were the wall I kept walking into.
I had the room now—Athletics — D.M., every other Thursday—and I had the shape of the crime, and I had Reyes's voice describing the afternoons, and I had a growing list of names of boys who'd been there and gone.
What I didn't have was a single piece of paper.
And without the paper, Mara was right, it was all just a story a girl was telling, and a story a girl is telling is the easiest thing in the world for powerful men to make disappear. They've had a lot of practice.
So I spent those weeks doing the part of the job they don't put in movies: trying, and failing, to get a document out of a system built to keep documents in.
I filed a public records request and got back a denial citing student privacy—which was clever, because they were using the privacy of the boys they'd hurt as a shield against exposing how they'd hurt them.
I found a former work-study kid from the compliance office who'd seen things, and got two cups of coffee deep into earning her trust before she got scared and stopped returning my texts.
I found a booster-funded "academic support" contract that hinted at the money flow and couldn't make it say anything a lawyer couldn't explain away.
Every door I pushed had a reason behind it, a privacy law or an NDA or a scared person, and every reason was load-bearing, and behind all of them was the same thing: a machine that had been getting away with this for years precisely because it was so good at making sure nothing was ever written down where I could reach it.
I'd come home from a day of doors and Cade would be there, or I'd go to him, and the contrast was almost too much—the cold institutional no of the daylight and then the warm undefended yes of the dark, and somewhere in those weeks I started to need him in a way that scared me, because needing is the thing my mother warned me about, the soft place, the thing a powerful man finds and uses.
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I learned him the way I learn a story—obsessively, in detail, unable to stop.
I learned that he'd taught himself, very young, not to have favorites—not a color, not a song, nothing soft enough to be worth taking—and I made it my quiet project to give a few of them back.
I learned that he'd buried a kid inside himself so deep he wasn't sure it was still alive, and I made it my private project to prove to him it was, not because it was good for the story—God, it was terrible for the story, every hour I spent loving him was an hour the conflict of interest grew teeth—but because watching the wall come down one brick at a time was the most moving thing I'd ever witnessed, and I'd witnessed a lot, I'd built a career on witnessing.
He told me about his father in pieces. The cold phone calls.
The love that came only when he was useful.
The way he'd taught himself to feel nothing visible, because visible feeling embarrassed them both.
And I'd lie there in the dark holding a defensive back built like a weapon while he told me, in the flattest possible voice, things that should have made him weep, and I'd understand that the flatness was the weeping, that he'd just never been allowed the other kind.
"Why are you telling me this," he asked once, almost suspicious, the reporter-radar in him as good as mine. "You could put any of this in a notebook. The injury. Voss. My dad even. It'd make your story sing."
"I'm never going to put one word of it anywhere," I said.
"Not the injury, not your dad, not us. You're not a source, Cade.
You're the one part of this whole thing I'm keeping for myself.
Whatever you tell me in the dark dies in the dark.
I'd burn my own story down before I'd use a single thing you handed me when your walls were down.
That's not the reporter promising. That's me. "
He'd gone very still. "Nobody's ever—" he started, and didn't finish, because there were a lot of sentences that ended nobody's ever with him, and most of them broke my heart.
"I know," I said. "Well. Somebody is now."
I meant it. I want that on the record, because of everything that came later, because of the night he'd accuse me of being Voss, because of the photos and the deal and the way it all nearly came apart.
I decided, in those first weeks under the rule, that I would protect Cade Lawson from my own story with everything I had—and I kept that promise.
When it mattered, when I had every weapon and every reason, I kept it.
The published piece doesn't have him in it.
I made sure. I made sure in the dark, weeks before it cost me anything, when it was still just a promise between two people who weren't allowed to touch in the daylight.
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Brielle figured it out, eventually, the way she figures out everything—by loving me too closely to be fooled.
"It's a player," she said, not a question, one night when I came in glowing and trying not to.
"The big story has a jawline. I knew it.
Sloane. I knew it." She didn't even sound mad.
She sounded scared, which was worse. "Tell me you know what you're doing.
Tell me you've thought about what happens if this gets out while you're the reporter on the story.
Because I love you, and I will never tell a soul, but I've watched you want this byline since freshman year, since they did you dirty, and I cannot watch somebody take it from you again—even if the somebody is a six-foot-whatever defensive back who apparently makes you reorganize the spice rack into a rainbow. "
"I'm protecting the work," I told her. "The work is clean. I checked. I keep checking."
"I'm not worried about the work." She took my hands.
"I'm worried about you. The work's gonna be fine, you're the best I've ever seen.
I'm worried about the girl who's gonna have to choose, someday, between the truest thing she ever wrote and the first person who ever made her feel like she didn't have to be sharp to be safe.
That choice is coming, Sloane. I can see it coming from here.
And I just want you to have thought about it before it's standing in your living room. "
I didn't answer her. I couldn't. Because she was right, and I'd been not-thinking about it with the full force of a professional not-thinker, and she'd just put it in my living room anyway, the choice, standing there, patient, waiting.
I didn't answer Brielle. I just let her be right, the way she usually was.
But walking home that night in the hoodie I'd quietly stopped pretending was his, I knew the thing I wasn't ready to say out loud yet—that I'd already chosen him, in some quiet unfileable place, weeks before the choice came standing into my living room for real.
That Brielle was right. That the spice rack was, in fact, a rainbow.
That I was in love, and the work was clean, and both of those things were true, and the cost of keeping them both true was going to be more than I had.
I just didn't know the number yet.
That was the stretch of weeks I'd give anything to climb back into now. We were happy, and careful, and certain we had time. We had so much less than we thought. You always do.
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