Page 45 of Borrowed Pain
They're watching my access. I'll have to move faster. If this is the end, remember—I love you —P
Another understanding dawned on me. "They must have passed this notebook back and forth, maybe leaving it at a secure location each time."
Miles closed the notebook, his expression bleak. "And they're onto her. That emergency call Rook got—it wasn't about being discovered; it was about Hendricks getting called in for questioning."
I flipped to a page near the back of Rook's notebook, where his handwriting deteriorated into barely legible scratches. The pen pressed deep enough to leave indentations on the pages beneath.
Medical trial subjects—post-treatment complications
One entry stopped me cold.
David—age 8—her nephew—Meridian trial subject 2019—severe dissociative episodes, selective memory loss, behavioral regression. P. devastated. Transferred to residential care facility outside state jurisdiction.
"Miles—look at this."
He leaned over my shoulder, reading the entry. "Eight years old," he whispered. "They experimented on an eight-year-old."
I grabbed my laptop, pulling up Hendricks's employment history. "The timeline," I said, pointing at the screen. "Hendricks got promoted right after her nephew became a test subject."
The pieces clicked together with sickening clarity. Hendricks's rapid promotion hadn't been a reward for competence. It had been strategic positioning.
"They bought her silence with a promotion," I said. "Then used her guilt to keep her compliant."
"No." Miles studied the dates more carefully.
He found more entries that painted a different picture. The promotion hadn't silenced Hendricks; it empowered her. It gave her access to everything she needed to build a case against the people who'd destroyed her nephew.
When we stared at her across her desk, I interpreted her wrong. I'd spent much of my career convincing myself that institutional power protected these people, and bureaucrats like Hendricks were either incompetent or complicit.
I'd never considered that she might be trapped.
"I called her a bureaucrat," I said quietly. "Dismissed her as another government drone protecting the system."
"You couldn't have known."
"I should have known. I'm supposed to be good at this—uncovering motives behind facades." I stood, pacing to a windowwhere Seattle's downtown core glittered through the rain. "I spent seven years at the Bureau learning to recognize the difference between coercion and corruption."
Miles joined me at the window, his reflection merging with mine in the rain-streaked glass. "Maybe that's exactly why you missed it. You were looking for federal corruption patterns, not family trauma responses."
"She's spent three years carrying guilt while pretending to be complicit."
"Every time someone like us showed up asking questions, she had to choose between helping them and maintaining her cover," Miles said. "How many people do you think she's had to turn away?"
The moral calculus was staggering. How many individual victims could she have helped if she'd blown her cover early? "She made the utilitarian choice," I said. "Sacrifice the few to save the many."
"And now that choice is collapsing."
We stared at each other, processing the implications. If Meridian had discovered Hendricks's double game, she wasn't only compromised—she was in immediate physical danger.
Miles reached out for my hand. "We have to find her."
"We don't even know where to look. And if we try to contact her directly, we could expose her further."
The thought of another federal ally disappearing—another Lucia lost to institutional power—made my pulse race. I'd spent three years believing I was fighting this battle alone. Now I discovered that someone had been fighting it from the inside, accumulating evidence while I fumbled around with podcasts and public records requests.
Were we too late to save her? I started to speak and then froze.
Miles met my gaze. "You want to go after them directly."
