Nothing.
A near-total blackout.
Every search for Dominion Hall had led to the same eerie conclusion: A handful of tax records, a few society-page mentions, and then … silence.
Like someone had gone through with digital bleach and scrubbed the internet clean.
It was odd.
More than odd.
Wrong.
That was why I’d taken the assignment.
Because if there was one thing I trusted after a decade in the field, it was that some stories could only be uncovered on the ground.
It was what they’d drilled into us at Columbia Journalism School, back when I believed truth was a bright, shining thing you could dig out of the dirt if you worked hard enough. My mentors—Professor Caplan with her razor-edged ethics lectures, and Robert Knight, the foreign correspondent who’d once smuggled film out of Caracas in his shoe—taught me the kind of integrity that didn’t bend, even when the world did.
Sometimes, it felt like I was a dying breed for holding onto that.
But I wasn’t here to fabricate a scandal or hunt shadows for sport.
I was here because when powerful men erased their own footprints, it usually meant the ground beneath them was unstable.
And now?
Standing in a ballroom filled with men whose posture, tailored suits, and quiet intensity told me everything my source couldn’t?—
I felt it in my bones.
There was a story here. And someone did not want it told.
A woman in sequins brushed past me and offered a polite, sugary smile—the kind Southern women seemed to master from birth. I tried to return it, but my face didn’t work that way.
“Where’re you visiting from?” she asked, the way someone might ask about a vacation.
I froze for half a second. My vowels didn’t match hers, or the room’s, and I’d known it the minute I stepped inside.
“D.C.,” I said. That was the easy answer. Safe. Neutral. Expected at an event like this.
But she tilted her head. “I knew it. No accent.”
I smiled tightly. “Just the boring kind.”
She laughed and disappeared into the crowd before I could think of something clever to say. I exhaled. Great. Already pegged as an outsider. Not hard, considering most of Charleston’s socialites could trace their roots back five generations and probably had silver spoons monogrammed with their family crests.
Truth was, whatever hint of a Canadian lilt I’d once had had been ironed out years ago—filed smooth by living out of bags in half a dozen countries and interviewing people whose accents shifted with the wind and borders. Spend enough time aroundthe world, and your own voice becomes a blend of everywhere and nowhere at once. A kind of neutral shell.
I lifted my chin, forcing myself to blend in. Shoulders relaxed. Mouth soft. Hands loosely holding the stem of my water glass. A woman who belonged here, or could, at least, pretend she did.
Funny—I could slip unnoticed into a tent full of soldiers, move through a refugee camp without drawing questions, blend into places where everyone guarded their lives with silence. War zones had a way of leveling people; danger didn’t care about accents, lineage, or designer gowns. Blending in there was about reading the room, respecting the culture, knowing when to speak and when to keep your head down.
Here?
Here, it felt like I was wearing a neon sign.
Maybe because my body buzzed with the wrong kind of awareness—not fear, but restlessness.
