The interview continues for another twenty minutes.
When Voss clicks the recorder off, the room exhales.
The held tension of fifty minutes in which one wrong sentence could have given Daniel's attorneys a foothold. I watch Maya's shoulders drop half an inch. Her hands unclench.
"I'll be in touch about the piece," Voss says. "My fact-checker will reach out separately for verification of the documentation you've shared."
Adrian crosses the room to us.
He stands in front of me. Hands in his pockets. His face is the same composed mask it always is, but something behind it has recalibrated.
"It went well," he says. Low enough that Maya, speaking with her mother across the room, doesn't hear. "Voss is thorough, she'll verify everything independently before publication. The piece will be solid."
"But?" Owen says.
Adrian looks at him. A beat.
"Daniel Hargrove.” Adrian adjusts a cufflink. "We've made him visible. He won't stay passive."
"What can we expect?" Jace asks.
"It’s unpredictable. This is the Atlantic Ledger. Elena Voss. The stakes for him are high." A pause. "I'll have contingencies in place. But you should understand that the moment that piece is published, the dynamic changes. We need to be prepared" He looks at me directly.
We have moved from a position of planning to a position of exposure, and exposure is not a condition I can manage by showing up and being consistent. It requires a different kind of readiness. The kind I haven't used since I left the Marines.
40
MAYA
The elevator hums going up and I feel the trepidation all over my body.
Forty-second floor. The numbers climb on the digital panel above the doors, pale blue against brushed steel, and I watch each one change. My reflection in the polished doors is someone I almost recognize. Straight-backed. Jaw set. Determined.
Reid is directly behind my right shoulder. I can feel him without turning. He hasn't spoken since the lobby, where he checked one last time if I’m ok with this. He doesn't need to. His silence has weight and direction, and both are pointed at whatever is on the other side of these doors.
Jace is restless with coiled energy. His hands are loose at his sides and he looks so thoroughly wrong in this sleek building with his mountain attire that it makes me smile.
Owen is on my left. His focus is on me. When I glance over, he holds my gaze for a beat, then two, and something in his expression communicates a sentence he won't say out loud.You're ready.
I'm not sure he's right. My pulse is running high and tight, a frequency I can feel in my attempt to normalize my breathing. Three days ago I sat on my mother's sofa and told Elena Voss everything. The words left my mouth and entered a recorder and traveled to an editor's desk and became something with a publication date and a headline, and in approximately twelve minutes that headline goes live and Daniel Hargrove's name becomes part of a story he cannot control.
This was Reid's idea. The confrontation. He explained it at the kitchen table last night while my mother pretended not to listen from the hallway.You don't wait for the enemy to establish position. You don't give him time to assess, to prepare, to choose his ground. You arrive before he knows you're coming.
I agreed because he was right and because I want to see Daniel's face when the ground shifts beneath him. I want to be there when it happens.
I want the men to see it too.
So here we are. Four people in an elevator in a building where Daniel Hargrove bills clients nine hundred dollars an hour, climbing toward a confrontation he doesn't know is coming.
The truth is I'm glad they're here. I wish I were the kind of person who could do this alone, who carried enough inside herself that she didn't need anyone beside her when the moment came. I wish I were that finished, that complete. But the woman I'm becoming doesn't need to be alone to be strong. She needs to stop pretending that needing people is the same thing as being weak.
The elevator chimes.
Forty-two.
The doors slide open and the light hits first, a wash of clean white spilling from floor-to-ceiling windows across an expanse of pale flooring. A reception area, curved desk in marble, a woman behind it with a headset and the composed posture ofsomeone trained to intercept without appearing hostile. Behind her, visible through glass partitions, an open office stretches back, forty or fifty desks arranged in a grid, monitors glowing, the low ambient hum of people doing expensive work. Beyond the desks, at the far end of the floor, a row of offices.
I step out. The men follow.
