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“No,” I say. “I wasn’t.”

He looks at me for a second, and then he comes back and sits on the edge of the bed, not touching me, and puts his glasses back on.

I drop my voice. “Baby boy, what he did to you was discriminatory. It was homophobic. It was a violation of the VA’s own ethics code, which I looked up. I, not your damned lawyer, was the one who looked that up. And I will be damned if I let you walk away from this thinking you got lucky. Thinking you just barely escaped something you were guilty of. You weren’t guilty of anything, Bastien. You were a gay man who gave a shit about his research subjects, and they tried to destroy you for it.”

“Even if you’re right—”

“I am right.”

“—filing a complaint won’t change anything. He’ll deny it. They’ll close ranks. It’ll be my word against a committee member with eleven investigations under his belt.”

“Then it’ll be on record. That’s the whole point. It’ll be documented. This finding tomorrow clears you and disappears into a file nobody reads. But a complaint against Chen—that stays. That’s the thing the next gay researcher who ends up in front of him gets to point to. A pattern. Evidence that this is what he does. Tomorrow is over before you walk in the door, baby boy. This is the fight that isn’t over. This is the one we actually get to have.”

“You want me to set myself on fire to be a beacon?”

“Who the fuck talks like that?” I ask.

Bastien turns red. “Sorry. Just somebody I met who’s…” He hesitates. “Who’s going to spend his whole life afraid.” He rubs his eyes. “That was unkind. He was right about most of it and I was rude to him because I did not want to be him.”

“But that’s not going to be you. I want you to stop accepting that you deserve to burn. Robby wasn’t describing his abuser when he called you, Bastien. That’s a man describing the one person who treated him like a human being. And they took that—they took his gratitude for your basic fucking decency—and they twisted it into evidence that you seduced him.”

Bastien’s breath is coming in sharp, shallow gasps. He wipes his eyes but doesn’t look at me.

“Robby loved you,” I say. “Not because you groomed him. Because you saw him. And then he died, and his grieving mother needed someone to blame, and a bigot on an ethics committee saw an opportunity to take down a gay researcher who dared to work with young men.”

I take his face in my hands. “Look at me, Bastien. You didn’t do anything wrong,” I say. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

And Bastien breaks. He starts to cry, so I fold him against my body and rub his back.

“I didn’t know,” he says. “I mean, I thought they were tough but I didn’t realize they were out to get me.” He wipes his eyes and makes a loud noise.

“You okay?”

He is quiet for a long time. Long enough that I start putting together what I’ll say next, and then stop. I’ve said enough tonight.

“I’ll file that complaint,” he says eventually. He turns his wedding ring around with his thumb.

“Oh, thank God. Are you okay with that decision?”

“Actually,” he says, “I’m better than okay. I’m fucking furious.”

“Good,” I say. “Hold onto that. Tomorrow they’re going to hand you your life back and expect you to say thank you. Don’t spend the anger.” I press my mouth to his hair. “Spend it on Chen.”

Chapter thirty-five

Bastien

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I ask when Levi pulls his suit out of the hotel closet.

“What did you think I was going to wear to the committee?” he demands.

The effort not to grit my teeth makes my jaw ache anyway. “You’re not even supposed to be in the room. At least one of these people thinks I’m a predator with a thing for young military men. And you’re…”

“Not wearing my uniform.”

“It doesn’t matter! You’re practically radiating it. Oh, my God, why didn’t I see it when it was right there in front of me?”

“Because you didn’t want to. You wanted my cock.”