Chapter 10
Porter lowered her voice.
“Now,” she said, “we can discuss what happens when no one can hear you.”
I kept my hand against the vanity, feeling the hard edge press into my palm. The room smelled of expensive hairspray and the faint metallic heat of stage lights. Beyond the walls, the foundation gala carried on as if nothing had changed. A string section moved into another song. Glasses chimed. Someone laughed close to the door.
“You locked me in,” I said.
“I didn’t.”
“You’re standing here while someone else does it.”
“That distinction may matter legally.”
“Not if you’re the one who arranged it.”
Her eyes cooled. “You’ve been listening to Gabriel Reed for too long.”
The name landed between us. She said it without hesitation, like she expected it to make me flinch.
I slid my phone from my pocket and tried the emergency call screen. No signal. The small bars stayed empty.
Porter watched me. “You won’t get a call out from this room.”
“Then why are you still talking?”
“Because you have a choice.”
She reached into her evening bag and removed a thin folder. It made no sound when she set it on the vanity beside the photographs I’d taken. The cover held my full name, printed beneath the hospital logo.
Inside was a copy of my employment file. My schedule. A disciplinary note about a missed equipment check. A still image from the surveillance camera, blurred at the edges but clear enough to show my face bent over Gabriel’s.
My stomach tightened.
“You knew about the recording before tonight,” I said.
“We know what the hospital owns.”
“The hospital doesn’t own me.”
“No,” Porter said. “But it owns the footage.”
She opened the folder to another page. “You can surrender the original report, sign a statement saying Gabriel manipulated you, and leave this room with your job history intact. The hospital will characterize the incident as a confused employee making a serious error under pressure.”
“And Gabriel?”
“He goes back under supervision.”
“Sedation?”
Her silence answered before she did.
A vibration moved through the wall, faint but regular. My recorder was still running beneath my sleeve.
I kept my voice level. “You’re asking me to help keep a man unconscious.”
“I’m asking you to stop pretending you understand the whole situation.”
“He was awake enough to warn me.”
“He was frightened and disoriented.”
“He knew the surveillance camera had recorded us.”
Porter’s mouth tightened. “He knew how to exploit your shame.”
The lock clicked.
This time the handle turned all the way down. The door opened two inches before a security guard’s shoulder appeared in the gap.
Porter stepped toward me. “Give me the envelope.”
I pulled it free beneath my coat and held it against my ribs. “No.”
Her expression finally cracked—not into anger, but calculation.
I touched the recorder through my sleeve and pressed the side button. The tiny confirmation vibration traveled up my arm.
“Everything you’ve said is recorded,” I told her.
The guard pushed the door wider. Porter glanced at him, then at me.
“You think that saves you?”
“No,” I said. “I think it makes you hurry.”
I threw the vanity chair at the open doorway.
The guard cursed and stumbled back. Porter reached for my wrist, but I twisted away, knocking the folder to the floor. Papers scattered over the carpet. I grabbed the envelope, shoved past her, and ran into the service corridor.
The music vanished behind the heavy door. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. I heard Porter shouting for security, followed by the quick slap of shoes behind me.
At the corridor junction, Celia Park stood beside a fire door, one hand raised.
“Here,” she said.
I ran to her. She caught my elbow only long enough to pull me through the door, then released me immediately.
Noah was waiting in the stairwell below, his phone pressed to his ear. Gabriel stood two steps behind him, pale beneath the rough shadow of his stubble, his shoulders tense under a borrowed jacket.
“Do you have it?” Celia asked.
I held up the envelope.
“Original?” Noah said.
“Yes.”
A crash sounded above us. The door began to open.
Celia took the envelope but didn’t move away. She checked the seal, then looked at my face. “Did she threaten you?”
“She offered to erase the footage if I gave this back.”
Noah ended his call. “And did she say who authorized the sedation?”
“Not directly.”
“Then we still need the recording.”
I touched my sleeve. “We have it.”
Gabriel’s gaze dropped to my hand, then returned to my eyes. He didn’t reach for me. He didn’t ask whether I was all right in the intimate, automatic way people did when they wanted comfort from an answer.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No.”
“Do you want me near you?”
The question caught me off guard. I shook my head once.
He nodded and stepped back.
Above us, the door slammed open. A voice ordered someone to stop.
Celia pushed the fire door shut. “We’re leaving through the loading level.”
As we descended, I looked at the report through the clear plastic sleeve. The pages showed occupied hospital areas marked unsafe, along with dates when corrections had been delayed until after the expansion vote. At the bottom of the routing note, one phrase was underlined twice:
Hold public release at Vale’s direction.
May you like
The report no longer felt like evidence of a bad decision. It felt like a map of the decision that had put Gabriel in that bed.
And now the people who made it were coming down the stairs after us.
