Page 23 of Borrowed Pain
"They knew about Riverside. That's the part that's been eating at me. Iris mentioned it exactly once, during a panic call at two-thirty in the morning."
"What else did they say?"
"Nothing. Line went dead." Miles met my gaze.
I respected his openness by sharing my own story. "I had a partner at the Bureau, agent Lucia Reyes. Baltimore field office."
Miles leaned forward slightly, concentrating on every word.
"We were working a case, investigating PTSD survivors who died after attending this wellness retreat in Virginia—Healing Horizons. Same pattern as what you're describing. People making progress in traditional therapy, then recruited for intensive programs that promised faster results."
"The other side of the country," whispered Miles.
"Lucia was brilliant. Obsessive like me, but in the best way. She'd stay until midnight cross-referencing financial records, looking for connections the rest of the team missed." My pen clicked rhythmically against the notebook. "The night before she died, she called me at home. Said she'd found something in the facility's insurance filings. Proof that their methods weren't only unethical—they were designed to cause psychological damage."
Miles leaned forward. "What kind of proof?"
"I never found out—car accident on I-95. Black ice, they said. Vehicle went through the guardrail, down into the Patapsco River."
"Fuck."
"They cleaned out her files before I could access them. Three months of investigation, gone. The official report blamed the weather, but..." I stopped clicking the pen. "Lucia was the most careful driver I knew. Former military, trained in defensive maneuvers. She'd driven through worse conditions."
Miles was quiet, studying my face. He read my emotional temperature, calculating how much pressure I could handle.
"You think they killed her."
"I think she got too close to something they needed to protect." I capped the pen. "I tried to present evidence to my supervisors about the cases Lucia and I were tracking. They swatted it all down. Six months later, I turned in my badge."
Miles's eyes never left mine. "That's why you started the podcast."
"Information wants to be free. Sometimes the only way to get justice is to make enough noise that ignoring you becomes impossible." I rubbed my thumb across the pen's lacquered surface. "But mostly, I started it because I couldn't stand the silence."
Miles reached across the table and covered my fingers with his palm.
"We're both haunted by ghosts," he said quietly.
"Yeah. We are."
The barista had abandoned any pretense of not eavesdropping, but I didn't care. Let her hear about federal agencies and dead partners and the guilt that came from failing the people you'd sworn to protect.
"Miles, have you ever been to Riverside? Are you prepared for what we might discover?"
His laugh rang sharp and insincere. "I stopped being prepared for anything the moment that voicemail started playing."
"Then we do this together."
He nodded. We'd confirmed our partnership.
The rain held off just long enough for my walk home. It hammered my warehouse windows while I hunched over my laptop for three hours, chasing digital breadcrumbs.
My third mug of coffee of the day sat beside a stack of printed documents. Riverside Mental Health Retreat should have left a paper trail thick enough to choke on—insurance documents, state inspections, and zoning permits for residential treatment facilities. Patricia Hendricks insisted it was a facility thoroughly investigated.
I found almost nothing.
The business license listed a P.O. Box in Bellevue. No physical address for patient treatment. No residential facility permits, and no inspections for medical equipment or housing compliance.
"What the hell?" I muttered, leaning closer to the screen.
