Chapter 5: What Priya Knew
Andrew's hand moved toward the phone.
Ethan picked it up first.
"Don't." He said it without raising his voice.
He ended the call, slipped the phone into his pocket, and looked at Andrew with the patience of a man who had already decided how this ended and was simply waiting for the other person to catch up.
"That recording is inadmissible," Andrew said.
"You can't—"
"I'm not a prosecutor.
I don't need it to be admissible." Ethan sat down in the chair near the door, completely at ease.
"Sit down, Andrew."
"I'm not going to—"
"Sit down."
Andrew sat.
It happened before he seemed to decide to do it, the way a body responds to authority it recognizes before the mind gives permission.
I stood near the vanity.
My hands had stopped shaking.
I noticed that and didn't know what to do with it.
"Here is what's going to happen tonight," Ethan said.
"You are going to go downstairs.
You are going to tell the foundation director that a scheduling conflict has come up and the award presentation will need to be postponed.
You are going to say goodnight to Senator Collins.
And then you are going to leave."
Andrew stared at him.
"And if I don't?"
"Then I walk downstairs right now and I tell every journalist in that room exactly what I saw when I opened this door forty minutes ago."
"You have no proof of anything."
"I have bruises," Ethan said simply.
"And I have eyes."
Andrew turned to me.
His voice dropped into the register he used when we were alone — quiet, almost gentle, which was always the most dangerous version of him.
"Ava.
Think about what you're doing.
Think about your mother.
Think about what this looks like for you — a woman who stayed silent for over a year.
Who do you think they'll believe?"
My throat tightened.
"They'll believe the bruises," Ethan said.
"Bruises fade." Andrew hadn't looked away from me.
"Reputations don't."
The door opened.
Not a knock.
Just the handle turning and the door swinging inward, and a woman stepping through it with a tablet under her arm and an expression that said she had been standing in that corridor long enough to hear more than she intended.
Dr.
Priya Anand was twenty-nine years old and looked younger.
She was still in her hospital badge from a shift that had apparently run long enough to carry her here, to this building, to this room.
She looked at Andrew.
Then at me.
Then at the phone in Ethan's pocket.
"I got a message," she said.
"From an unknown number.
It said to come to the fourth floor of Carter Tower before eight o'clock if I wanted to tell the truth about something I'd been carrying for six months."
Andrew stood up slowly.
"Priya—"
"Don't." Her voice was steady.
"I've been waiting for six months for someone to give me a reason." She set her tablet on the vanity beside my evening bag.
"I have photographs.
Taken with my own phone, with her permission, the night she came to the hospital.
I asked her to let me document them in case she ever needed them." She looked at me.
"You didn't call.
But I kept them anyway."
The room was completely silent.
Andrew's voice, when it came, had shed every layer of performance.
"Those photographs are a violation of patient confidentiality.
You could lose your license."
"She wasn't my patient," Priya said.
"She was a woman standing in a hospital corridor with fingerprints on her arm.
I documented them as a private individual." She paused.
"I've already spoken to a lawyer.
I made that call three months ago, just in case."
Andrew looked at me one more time.
The look was not angry.
It was something worse — assessing, recalculating, searching for the exit.
"Ava," he said.
"Whatever you think is happening here—"
"She knows exactly what's happening," Priya said.
He straightened his jacket.
He looked at Ethan.
He looked at the door.
"This isn't finished," he said.
"Actually," Ethan said, "it is."
Andrew walked out.
The door closed behind him with a soft, precise click — the sound of a man who understood that slamming it would cost him something.
Priya let out a long breath.
She sat down on the velvet bench without being invited.
"Is he going to run?" she asked.
"He won't get far," Ethan said.
He was already on his phone again.
"My attorney has the recording.
Priya, I'll need copies of those photographs sent to this address within the hour."
"Already done," she said.
"I sent them twenty minutes ago.
The message told me to."
Ethan looked up.
"What message?" I said.
Priya turned her tablet toward us.
The unknown number.
The message.
And below it, a second message sent just two minutes ago from the same number:
*The police contact is already expecting your call.
Ask for Detective Reyes.*
Ethan looked at his phone.
May you like
Then at me.
"I didn't send that," he said.
