Divorced and dying;now watch me rise

Chapter 6

Damien called four times in the space of one week.

I let every one go to voicemail.

His lawyer sent a formal letter about the settlement. My lawyer, the one Audrey had found who worked on deferred payment, read it and said in a very even tone that Damien had significantly undervalued my financial contributions to his career and that we would be responding accordingly.

I found that satisfying in a way I did not try to examine too closely.

The weeks moved slowly the way recovery weeks did, measured in lab results and small physical victories. The morning I woke up and my hands opened without assistance I lay in bed for a full minute just opening and closing them like they were something new. I almost called Steven to tell him. I stopped myself because that was not the kind of call a patient made to a doctor and I was not interested in making things complicated.

Week five the swelling in my knees reduced enough that I could take short walks. The first one I took was to the corner and back and I came home and sat on Audrey's couch and did not tell her that I had to stop twice because my back disagreed with the plan. She knew anyway. She knew everything.

"You're improving," she said.

"Slowly."

"Slowly is still moving."

I opened the blue notebook at the kitchen table that evening and I worked for two hours. My handwriting was still shakier than I liked but it was legible and my mind was clearer than it had been in months. The Veridex timeline. The three contacts. A fourth name that had surfaced when I'd been searching my email archives, a former employee who had sent me a message eighteen months ago that I had been too ill to follow up on.

I sent a careful email to that contact.

I did not tell Steven I had done this.

I told myself it was because the investigation was separate from my treatment and I did not want to complicate either.

I told myself that for about three days before I admitted it was also because I didn't yet know how much of his connection to Veridex was personal history and how much was something else.

I was a journalist. Caution was not paranoia. It was professional practice.

On a Thursday morning in the sixth week Steven came out of his office before the receptionist called my name.

He stopped when he saw me.

I was sitting in the waiting room with the blue notebook open in my lap, my pen moving. I had arrived fifteen minutes early because I could not sleep and I had nothing else to do with the alertness.

He looked at the notebook. Then at me.

"You're working," he said.

"Waiting."

"You're working while waiting."

"I have a brain that doesn't turn off just because the rest of me is broken." I closed the notebook. "Is that a medical concern?"

"No." He held the door open. "Come in."

We did the session. My markers had improved again. Kidney function had moved from twenty nine to thirty six percent, which Steven described as significant in that understated way he had that I was beginning to understand meant he was actually pleased.

"Thirty six," I said.

"It will fluctuate. But the trajectory is the right direction."

I looked at my hands. Steady today. The joints still visible, still inflamed at the knuckle, but functional. Cooperative.

"Steven," I said.

He was writing in the file.

"If you had information about a company. Information that could protect people but that you couldn't use yourself. Would you give it to someone who could?"

He stopped writing.

He looked up slowly.

"That depends on the someone," he said.

"Someone who would use it responsibly. Who would verify everything. Who would not burn sources or cut corners."

He looked at me for a long moment. Long enough that I could hear the clinic's front door open and close in the waiting room.

"Are you asking me to help you," he said, "or are you asking me a hypothetical."

"I'm asking you directly."

He closed the file.

He leaned back in his chair, which was the most relaxed posture I had seen from him in six weeks of appointments, and he looked at me with an expression I could not fully read.

"My mother has documents," he said. "Medical records from the years her diagnosis was delayed. Records that show the timeline of which medications she was taking and when her markers became unreadable." A pause. "I have never shown them to anyone."

My heart was doing something loud and attentive.

"Would she consent to being part of the story?" I asked carefully.

"I don't know," he said. "You would have to ask her."

We held that between us for a moment.

"You'd let me ask her," I said.

"I'd introduce you," he said. "What she decides is hers to decide."

I looked at him. At the careful way he had framed that, the way he gave the power of it to his mother rather than himself.

"Thank you," I said.

He picked the file back up.

"Don't thank me yet," he said. "She's formidable. She'll have questions."

"I have answers."

"She'll have more questions."

Something about the way he said it made me almost smile. The faintest warmth in the warning, like he was already imagining the meeting and knew who would hold their own.

My phone rang.

Unknown number.

I looked at it, then at Steven, then back at the phone.

"Take it," he said, standing. "I need to review the next labs. I'll be back."

He walked out of the office.

I answered.

Silence for a moment.

Then a woman's voice, low and careful.

"Is this Nora Green? The journalist?"

"Yes," I said slowly.

"My name is not important right now. What's important is that I worked for Veridex for four years and I left eight months ago and I have been trying to figure out who to call since the day I walked out of that building." A pause. "I saw your fundraiser. I recognized your name from a message you sent me eighteen months ago. I'm sorry I didn't respond then. I wasn't ready."

My hand tightened on the phone.

"I'm ready now," she said. "And Nora, what I have goes a lot further than a drug approval gap. This goes all the way to the top and it involves people in this city that you might know. People connected to your life in ways you haven't figured out yet."

The room was very quiet.

"I need to meet you," she said. "In person. Not here. Not by phone. And I need you to come alone."

"When," I said.

"Saturday. Noon. There's a coffee shop on Birch and Seventh."

"I'll be there," I said.

She hung up.

I sat in Steven Nakamura's office with my phone in my hand and my heart beating fast and the journalist part of me, the part that had been sleeping for two years, had woken up fully and was already pulling at every thread in reach.

People connected to your life in ways you haven't figured out yet.

The door opened and Steven came back in with a folder.

He looked at my face.

"Everything alright?" he asked.

I made a decision in the space of one second.

"Yes," I said. "Everything's fine."

I smiled at him.

He looked at me for half a second longer than the answer required.

Then he sat down and opened the folder.

He didn't push.

But I had the very specific feeling, sitting across from a man who noticed everything and said only what was necessary, that he did not entirely believe me.