Page 127

Only then did I allow myself to think. The first person who came to mind was Victoria.

I had spent years reading clinical data, studying molecules, and asking questions that often had no immediate answers. Every experiment began with uncertainty. Every result demanded skepticism, even when it confirmed what we hoped to find. Especially then. Science depended on the willingness to admit that we might be wrong.

Somewhere along the way, Victoria had stopped respecting the people who did. She hadn’t walked into the boardroom hoping she was right.

She had walked in believing she was.

The certainty of that unsettled me more than anything else. She hadn’t hesitated. She hadn’t questioned herself. She had trusted her own conviction enough to gamble with another person’s life, and ultimately her own.

Victoria wasn’t a scientist. She had built her career making decisions, and along the way, she had begun to mistake authority for understanding. She had come to believe she knew more than the people who had spent their lives studying the very thing she sought to control.

Wisdom wasn’t knowing you were right. Wisdom was remembering you could be wrong.

I wondered when that happened. Not the first unethical decision. Not the first compromise. Those things rarely arrived all at once. They accumulated, one justification at a time, until questioning yourself became unnecessary because you had already decided the answer.

It would be easy to tell myself I could never become that person. Easy to believe that certainty belonged to someone else. But if there was one lesson science had taught me, it was that conviction was never enough. Every conclusion had to survive questions, scrutiny, and evidence. The moment you stopped inviting those things in, you became vulnerable to believing your own certainty.

The only safeguard was the willingness to keep asking questions.

Inevitably, my thoughts turned to Alexander.

The comparison was not fair. It was not even close. Victoria had been willing to let other people bear the consequences of her certainty. Alexander had been unwilling to let me bear the consequences of mine.

Victoria had become so convinced of her own conclusions that she no longer recognized the danger. Alexander had become so convinced of the danger that he no longer questioned whether the decision was his to make.

Their intentions could not have been more different. But somewhere between certainty and consequence, both had stopped asking who had the right to choose.

I looked down at the folded note.

When you’d like to see me, I’ll come.

Alexander hadn’t asked for forgiveness. He hadn’t defended himself. He had left the decision where it belonged. With me. I wasn’t ready to decide what came after this. But I was ready to hear the truth.

I picked up my phone.

* * *

A knock came a few minutes later and I walked toward the door. My hand rested on the doorknob for a second. Then I opened the door.

Alexander stood on the other side. There were no flowers, no gift, no carefully chosen gesture that asked something of me before either of us had spoken.

He looked tired. “Thank you for seeing me.”

I stepped aside. “Come in.”

He stepped across the threshold without speaking. His eyes moved around the apartment, taking everything in without lingering anywhere for long. He had been inside my apartment once before, but had never really seen it. Not like this. Not the life I had built before him.

I gestured toward the chair across from the sofa. “Please, sit.”

He did. Not beside me. Across from me, with the coffee table between us. He didn’t try to close the distance I had left. He simply waited.

There was only one place to begin.

“When did you first know Victoria was involved?”

“The night you forwarded the email to Marcus. It was traced. The forensic trail ended at a name I’d hoped I would never see again. I didn’t have proof. I had a name and six years of knowing what she was capable of.”

“When did it stop being a suspicion?”