Chapter 33 The Informant Inside Harlow

Chapter 33 The Informant Inside Harlow
POV: Wren

Not my advisor.
Two offices down.
I knew the room before I had fully processed the name. Third door on the left in the journalism department corridor, the one with the small cactus on the windowsill visible through the glass panel, the one whose occupant had been at Harlow for eight years and sat on committees and attended department events and existed in the comfortable institutional way of someone who had been somewhere long enough to become part of the furniture.
Professor Aldridge.
I had spoken to him fourteen times in two years. I had counted without meaning to, the way I counted things when they mattered, and fourteen was the number that came up immediately because each of those conversations had been logged in my memory the way I logged all faculty interactions, noted and filed and assessed for usefulness or risk.
Fourteen conversations and I had assessed zero of them as risk.
"You're sure," I said to Jamie.
"I have an email," he said. "Sent from his university address to a contact address I traced back to Thrace's firm. Eighteen months before you enrolled. It describes a prospective student whose high school journalism record warranted monitoring." A pause. "It uses your name."
Eighteen months before I enrolled.
He had flagged me before I arrived. Before my application was processed. Before I had done anything at Harlow or connected myself to any story or given anyone on this campus a reason to pay attention to me. He had flagged me from my high school record alone.
"How did he know about my high school work," I said.
"Scholarship selection," Jamie said. "He was on the committee. Your application included clips. He read them and sent the email the same week."
The scholarship selection committee. The body that had reviewed my application, assessed my work, decided I was worth funding. Aldridge had been in the room when my clips were distributed. He had read my work, recognised the instincts in it, and sent an email to Thrace's firm before the ink was dry on my acceptance letter.
He had let me in and then told them I was coming.
I said I'd call Jamie back and ended the call and sat at my desk and went through every interaction with Aldridge from the beginning.
The first conversation, orientation week, hallway, brief, he had said your work in the application was strong, we're glad you're here. Standard. Nothing in it.
The second, a department mixer, he had asked about my interests, I had said investigative and corrections work, he had nodded and said those instincts were rare, source protection especially, most students didn't understand it until they'd made an expensive mistake.
Source protection.
He had said source protection specifically. To a student he had known for two weeks. At a mixer where that level of specificity was unusual enough that I had noted it at the time as an interesting observation from a faculty member who paid attention.
He had not been paying attention to my potential.
He had been assessing what I knew about how to protect sources. Whether I was the kind of journalist who would give up a name under pressure or hold it.
He needed to know what he was dealing with.
The third interaction that rearranged itself was not the third chronologically but it was the one that hit hardest when I found it.
A scholarship committee progress meeting. End of my first semester, the kind of check-in where the committee reviewed whether funded students were performing at the expected level. Aldridge had been present. Midway through the meeting he had asked, conversationally, whether I had anything significant in development for the second semester. Story pipeline, he had said. Just curious about your direction.
I had answered. I had told him I was looking at the athletics department budget discrepancy that had appeared in the university's public financial filing. A small thing at that point, just a thread I was pulling, nothing sourced, nothing ready.
I had answered without thinking because he was faculty and it was a committee meeting and there was no version of that situation in which I had understood it as a risk.
I looked at the date of that meeting in my mental log.
Six days.
Six days before Callum walked into the paper office with a folder and my high school article and a proposition I had spent four days deciding to accept.
Six days before the arrangement that had made me visible on this campus for the first time in two years.
I put my pen down on the desk.
Callum was watching my face. He had been watching it since I ended the call, not asking, waiting, giving me the space to get there and then tell him what I found.
"Aldridge flagged my story pipeline in a committee meeting," I said. "Six days before you came to my office."
Callum went very still.
"He asked what I was working on," I said. "I told him. Athletics budget discrepancy. Small, unsourced, just a direction." I looked at the desk. "Six days later you walked in with a folder about a gambling arrangement running through the athletics program."
The room was quiet enough that I could hear the building settling around us.
"He told them what you were looking at," Callum said.
"Yes."
"And my father sent me to manage it." His voice was flat and precise. "Not because of the bet pool. The bet pool was secondary. He sent me because Aldridge told Thrace that a journalist in the journalism department was already looking at the athletics program."
"And the safest way to manage a journalist," I said, "is to get close enough to control what they find."
Callum looked at his hands on the desk.
"I came to you because of my father," he said. Not a question. Stating it, setting it down in the space between us, not flinching from the shape of it.
"You came to me because Aldridge told them I was already close," I said. "Whether your father told you that or just pointed you in my direction and let you find your own reason."
He looked up.
The question was there on his face and I did not have a clean answer for it and we both knew it and neither of us looked away.
My phone buzzed. Jamie.
One text. No words. Just a photo attachment.
I opened it.
It was a screenshot of an email chain. Aldridge's university address at the top. The recipient was not Thrace this time.
It was the dean of students office.
Sent this morning. Two hours before Marcus's formal meeting request came through the official portal.
Aldridge had filed the meeting request on Marcus's behalf.