Page 58 of Sawyer
Sawyer takes the chair again. He’s so close I could reach out and brush the hardened scar near his collarbone if I wanted. I don’t. I can’t. There’s a tightness in his mouth I don’t recognize, a secret lodged like a pebble under the tongue.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I ask.
The muscles along his jaw leap. He looks at the door instead of me. “We’ll talk when you’re resting.”
“I’m resting.” I gesture at the cannula taped to my hand, the beeping monitor counting my every spike. “Talk.”
He exhales through his nose, the way he does right before he picks a wire to cut. “Hartley wants to take your statement before we?—”
I snap. “Sawyer.”
His attention snaps with me. For a second the soldier falls off and the man shows; it hurts more, seeing him bare and bracing.
“Okay,” he says. Careful. “First: the text that got you to the garden wasn’t your father. It was spoofed.”
My lungs let out air I didn’t realize was hoarded. It explains the wrongness, the prickle. “Then who?—?”
He swallows. His eyes flicker—hallway, IV pole, my face—calculating angles. “Someone used a contact they knew you’d trust to get you outside.”
“Someone inside,” I say, because he’s trained me to follow threads. “Someone who knew which name would move me.”
“Yes.”
He doesn’t keep going. I can feel the rest of it in the room like electromagnetic vibrato, rattling the bed rails. “That’s not the pebble,” I say. “Say it.”
He rubs the heel of his hand once over his sternum, a soldier’s tell I’ve learned to read. “Cam…” He sits forward, elbows onknees, head bowed like a man about to pray to a god he doesn’t believe in. “Your father made a deal. Months ago. To create… a controlled security narrative around the company and—” His throat tightens. He forces the next words out. “—around you.”
I flinch so hard the blood-pressure cuff thinks it’s a crisis. It starts to inflate. I rip it off with my free hand.
“What does that mean?” The question comes out brittle and quiet at the same time.
“PR. Manufactured urgency. The firm staged mild threats—paper notes, online chatter—to boost the story before the IPO. No contact. No weapons. Your father says he pulled the plug after the first breach. His partner—Vale—ignored him. Hired a freelancer named Rourke. It escalated out of control.”
The ceiling hum surges. Or maybe that’s my skull filling with bees. I stare at him, shaking my head in a slow motion that tries to erase everything he said syllable by syllable.
“No,” I say. “No. He wouldn’t.” Words scramble over each other, tripping. “My father is—he’s ridiculous about optics and shareholders and who sits where at the gala, yes, but he wouldn’t—” My voice splits. “He wouldn’t use me like that.”
Sawyer doesn’t reach for me. He’s learned the shape of my edges. “He admitted it,” he says.
“Liar,” I snap, not sure if I mean my father or Sawyer. That’s how bad it is.
He doesn’t flinch. “He thought it would stay staged. He says he tried to stop it. Vale—the partner—went outside the plan. Brought in a guy blacklisted for going hot. Cam, I’m not defending him. I’m telling you the chain so we can break it.”
I hear him. I don’t hear him. My bones hear him, but my skin refuses.
“That text said my father’s name.” Tears breach despite every command I give them to stand down. “It was him.”
“It was his ghost.” He swallows. “Spoofed to look like him. Because the real him made it plausible.”
The nurse peeks in, reading the volume and our faces the way nurses do. She retreats silently and I hate that she saw us like this.
“Get my dad,” I say, voice low and lethal. “I want to see him.”
“Cam…”
“Get. Him.” A thousand memories line up behind the command: Gregory pushing me higher on the tire swing, Gregory attending my middle school ‘art show’ in the cafeteria and buying every macaroni frame for ten dollars each, Gregory calling me Pumpkin in front ofeveryoneand me cringing because Dad and love and embarrassment are synonyms when you’re fourteen. People aren’t simple. They’re messy. But they don’t weaponize you for stock prices. They don’t.
Sawyer stands, the chair legs scraping. He looks bigger and further away all at once. “Hartley’s with him. They’ll arrange it. But before he walks in?—”
