"You learned to survive without being cared for," I say. "I am still deciding how much of the world should suffer for that."
She stares at me.
"We should go," I say. "There are preparations to make."
I walk toward the car, and after a moment I hear her footsteps behind me. I open the passenger door for her and wait for her to get in. Just as she is about to fold into the car, she stops, straightens, and stands right in front of me, with only the car door between us.
"That thing you said,” she says, “About the world suffering."
"Yes."
"You meant it?"
I look at the flecks of silver-gray in her irises.
"I have never said something I didn't mean."
She lifts one hand from the top of the car door and brings it to the side of my face, searching my eyes with hers. Then she brings her lips lightly to mine, barely a touch, leaves them there for a moment. The urge to press forward is enough to knock me sideways. But I don’t, I let her lead, and just as I’m about to give in to the desire, she pulls back. The air compresses around me at the sudden lack of contact.
“Thank you,” she says. Only this time, it isn’t anger or gratitude I see in her expression, it’s something entirely more dangerous.
***
It's three in the morning and I’m sitting at the desk in my study with a glass of vodka I haven't touched and a file I've read four times.
Dr. Richard Samuel Hale.
Forty-three years old. MBBS, MRCOG, FRCOG. Clinical lead at a private practice that turns over three-hundred-and-seventy million dollars a year. Eleven years in post. His reputation is impeccable, referrals are excellent and patient reviews are enthusiastic. He has several awards, including a healthcare innovation commendation from a charity gala where he almost certainly sat at the top table and smiled for photographs and shook the hands of people who are only going to make him richer.
I turn the page.
Patient complaints: three. All filed within the last eight years. All involving women. All dismissed at the preliminary review stage due to insufficient evidence, the medical council's language forwe chose not to look closely enough.Two of the women withdrew their complaints. The third pursued hers for fourteen months before disappearing from the record. I have a separate note on where she is now, who she hired, and what it cost her.
I turn another page.
Financial interests: a private investment in a pharmaceutical company that manufactures the pain management medication he most commonly prescribes off-label. A consulting fee from a medical device company whose products he recommends at a statistically improbable rate.
Nothing individually that would destroy him. Everything, assembled into the right format and delivered to the right people, that absolutely will.
I close the file.
Katriona kept his name. She said it with the tone of someone who was keeping score.
I am going to finish what she started.
I pick up my phone.
Mirko answers on the second ring, despite the hour, because instruction went out two days ago with a priority marker Mirko knows meanseverything else stops.
"Begin tonight,” I say simply. “I want the submissions drafted before morning. The journalist contact happens tomorrow evening, after the surgery, when I know Katriona is stable and I have the bandwidth to finalize the language."
"Do you want him to know it's coming?"
I consider this. There is a version of this that includes a conversation with Hale. A moment in which he understands exactly who is dismantling him and why, the way men like him are always faintly surprised to discover that women in pain sometimes have people in their corner.
I decide against it. He doesn't deserve to know her name is in this. He doesn't get to have that. I don’t want him to have even a second to prepare for what’s about to happen to him.
"No," I say, knowing that by the end of tomorrow, Katriona will be out of surgery and Richard Hale will be reduced to nothing.
