Chapter 24 Wren Meets Jamie

Chapter 24 Wren Meets Jamie
POV: Wren

The coffee shop was on a main street in a town I had never been to, forty minutes from Harlow, small enough that two strangers meeting for coffee would not register as anything worth noting.
Jamie was already inside when I arrived.
I knew him immediately, not from memory because three years had changed the shape of him considerably, but from the way he was sitting. Back to the wall, both hands around a cup he wasn't drinking from, eyes on the door. The posture of someone who had been watching entrances for long enough that it had stopped being a decision and become just how they sat.
I knew that posture. I had been wearing it for two years.
He stood when I came in. He was twenty-three and carried it like someone older, not in the face exactly but in the way he moved, careful and deliberate, the specific economy of someone who had learned not to make sudden actions in rooms they didn't fully trust.
We sat.
He put the manila envelope on the table between us and left his hands on either side of it without opening it, like he had rehearsed getting this far and now needed a second before the next part.
"You look the same," he said.
"You don't," I said, and meant it as the observation it was, not a criticism.
He almost smiled. It didn't complete itself. "Two years of watching your own back does something to your face apparently."
I looked at the envelope. "How long have you had these."
"Since the week after the story was pulled. They came through an anonymous email to an account I used for school stuff. By the time I tried to trace the sender it was gone." He pushed the envelope an inch toward me. "I didn't know what to do with them. I was seventeen and the people in those emails had already shown me exactly what they were willing to do."
I opened the envelope.
Eight pages. Printed emails, originals by the look of the header formatting, not screenshots, actual printed correspondence. I laid them out in the order they came and read from the top.
The sender address on the first email was a domain I recognised from Callum's files. Thrace's firm. The recipient was the administrative coordinator at Crestfield, not the principal, the coordinator, which was the careful choice of someone who understood institutional structure well enough to know that the coordinator processed paperwork and the principal made decisions and keeping them in separate email threads maintained deniability between the two.
The language was exactly what I expected and somehow still worse to see in print. Nothing explicit. Nothing that said pull the story or suppress the investigation or make the journalist disappear. Just careful, considered sentences about community relationships and institutional reputation and the importance of managing sensitive information responsibly during periods of public interest.
Managing sensitive information.
That was the phrase. That was the whole operation in three words, dressed in the language of administration.
I photographed every page. Both sides, multiple angles, then the envelope itself with the pages laid out in sequence. My hands were steady doing it. I had trained them to be steady doing things like this.
"The dates," I said, without looking up from the photography.
"Third email," Jamie said. "Look at the timestamp."
I looked. Seven days before my article published. They had been managing the situation before the article was even finished. Someone had told them it was coming and they had started the correspondence before I had written the final paragraph.
Chen. Her address in the cc line of a different email chain, flagging my pipeline. She had told them early enough that they had seven days to prepare.
Seven days to write careful emails and brief an administrative coordinator and arrange for a legal team to apply pressure through the right channels in the right order.
I put the camera down.
"I'll protect your name," I said. "Same as before."
Jamie looked at me across the table. The almost-smile came back, different this time, something in it that was tired and warm and sad all at once. "You protected it before at a cost I have thought about every month since it happened." He put both hands flat on the table. "This time I'm not letting you do it alone."
I looked at him.
"I'll go on the record," he said. "With my name. With the envelope. With everything I know about who sent these and why." He held my eyes. "I should have done it two years ago. I was scared and I made you carry it instead. I'm not doing that again."
I sat with that for a moment. The weight of it and what it meant for the story and what it meant outside the story.
"It changes the risk level for you significantly," I said.
"I know what the risk level is," he said. "I've been living inside it for two years. At least this way it moves."
I put the photographed pages back in the envelope and folded the top carefully and slid it back toward him because the physical copies stayed with him until we had a secure transfer plan in place and the legal protection documentation filed. He took it and put it in the bag beside him and sat back.
We talked for twenty more minutes. Logistics, timeline, the press freedom organisation that had been maintaining the protective record, the lawyer's contact information, the protocol for his on-record statement. He asked two sharp questions that told me he had been thinking about this carefully for longer than two years. I answered both fully.
Outside the coffee shop window the main street did its ordinary thing. Cars, a woman with a pushchair, two teenagers outside a pharmacy.
I left first. He waited five minutes per the protocol we agreed.
I was forty minutes into the drive back, just past the highway junction, when my phone rang through the car speaker. Priya.
"Hey," I said.
"Wren." Her voice was wrong. Flat and careful in the way she went flat and careful when she was trying not to alarm me before she had all the words ready. "Someone was in the apartment."
My hands stayed on the wheel.
"Nothing is taken," she said quickly. "I checked everything. Nothing's gone." A pause, and in the pause I heard her deciding how to say the next part. "But your backup hard drive. The one you keep in the bottom drawer of your desk."
"What about it," I said.
"It's plugged in," she said. "Into your laptop. Wren, you didn't leave it plugged in."