Chapter 287: Chapter 289: The Legal Team Took Up The Case
The office was very quiet.
Morrison looked at her for a long moment.
"You saved my life," he said finally. "Four years ago. That patient....the Martinez case, the cardiac arrest in the middle of your second rotation, the one everyone said was unsurvivable." He paused. "You stayed four hours past the end of your shift and you didn’t leave that room."
She looked at him.
"I know who you are in this hospital," he said. "I’ve known for four years." He leaned forward. "So does every nurse on the east wing. So does every junior doctor you’ve supervised." He paused. "The board is going to do what the board does. And we are going to support you through every stage of it." He held her gaze. "Is that clear."
Something moved in her chest.
She kept her face steady.
"Clear," she said.
"Good." He picked up his phone. "Now. I need you to call whoever you have on the legal side and get them in here today. Because we are not doing this on the back foot."
She stood up.
"Morrison," she said.
He looked up.
"Thank you," she said.
He waved it off with the specific impatience of a man who didn’t want to be thanked for doing what he considered obvious.
She went to call Damien.
****
DAMIEN’S POV
He picked up on the first ring.
He listened.
He didn’t say anything until she finished, which took four minutes, and she gave him everything....the article, the publication, the board’s preliminary inquiry, Morrison’s response.
When she finished he was quiet for three seconds.
"Where are you now," he said.
"Morrison’s office."
"Stay there. I’m sending the legal team to you in the next twenty minutes." He was already moving....she could hear it in the background, the shift, the machine of him switching into gear. "Don’t speak to the board, don’t speak to anyone from the publication, don’t respond to anything until the lawyers are with you."
"I know."
"Aria."
"I know, Damien."
A pause.
"She used Claire Mercer," he said.
"The byline."
"Yes." He paused. "Marcus has been tracking Mercer’s encrypted communications for two weeks. We knew she was a possibility. We weren’t fast enough." Another pause, and she could hear what was underneath it.....not anger at her, not blame. Just the cold fury of a man who had been three steps behind on this one and knew it. "I’m sorry. We should have moved faster."
"We move now," she said.
"Yes." A beat. "How are you."
She stood in Morrison’s office and looked at the window. The hospital outside. The ordinary morning continuing around a thing that was going to change it.
"I’m ready," she said.
"That’s not what I asked."
She looked at the window.
"I’m scared," she said. Quietly. Honestly. "And I’m ready. Both."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I’ll be there in an hour," he said.
"You don’t have to...."
"I’ll be there in an hour," he said again.
She put the phone in her pocket.
She looked at Morrison across his desk.
"Legal team in twenty minutes," she said.
He nodded.
"And the article," she said. "Can you send it to me. The full text."
"You’ve already read it."
"I need to read it again." She held his gaze. "I need to know every word she used. Every question she asked. Every gap she left." She paused. "Because I’m going to fill those gaps myself before she gets to do it for me."
Morrison looked at her for a moment.
Then he forwarded the article.
She sat back down in the chair and opened her phone and started reading from the beginning.
This time she wasn’t just reading it.
She was looking for the shape of what came next.
****
The legal team arrived in nineteen minutes.
Three of them. She’d met the lead before.....a woman named Catherine Walsh who Damien used for everything sensitive and who had the specific quality of stillness that came from spending twenty years in rooms where everything was on fire and learning not to flinch.
Catherine shook her hand and sat down and opened her laptop and said tell me everything from the beginning and Aria told her.
Everything.
Not the edited version. Not the version that started with the estate and left out the parts before it. Everything....the hacking, the jobs, the underground network, the false identity, the specific chain of decisions that had led a twenty three year old with a dying mother and no options to a greenhouse in the middle of the night to getting caught by Damien.
Catherine listened without writing anything down for the first ten minutes.
Then she started writing.
When Aria finished Catherine looked at her across the table.
"Is there anything else," she said. "Anything not in the article that could surface."
"There are jobs that aren’t documented," Aria said. "Three of them. Small. Nothing that caused direct harm to individuals." She paused. "There’s one that I’m less certain about. A corporate data job from four years ago. I didn’t know at the time who the end client was."
"Find out," Catherine said. To one of the people beside her, not to Aria.
"Already running it," the person said.
Catherine looked back at Aria. "The medical licence. Walk me through the timeline."
Aria walked her through it.
The identity she’d used for the hacking work had been completely separate from her real name. She’d kept them rigorously apart....different devices, different networks, different everything. When she’d applied to medical school she’d applied as herself. Aria Chen. Real name, real transcripts, real everything.
"So the licence itself is clean," Catherine said.
"The licence is completely clean," Aria said. "The person who did those jobs and the person who applied to medical school were never legally the same person."
"But they were actually the same person."
"Yes."
Catherine wrote something down.
"The board’s inquiry," Aria said. "What’s the realistic timeline."
"Preliminary inquiry, two to three weeks. If it escalates to a full hearing, three months minimum." Catherine looked at her. "It won’t escalate to a full hearing."
