Chapter 34 The Timeline Shifts

Chapter 34 The Timeline Shifts
POV: Wren

Aldridge had filed the meeting request.
I read the screenshot three times and then forwarded it to the offsite account and then put the phone face down and sat in the quiet of my bedroom and looked at the wall and let it all move through me in order.
Aldridge on the scholarship committee eighteen months before I enrolled, reading my application clips and sending an email to Thrace's firm the same week. Aldridge at the department mixer asking about source protection with the specific interest of someone running a diagnostic. Aldridge in the committee meeting six days ago asking about my story pipeline and receiving an answer he immediately passed upward through a channel that connected to Marcus.
Six days.
I picked up the pen and drew the timeline on a blank page. Not the connection map this time, just a straight line with dates on it. Aldridge's email to Thrace's firm at the far left. My enrollment. Two years of invisible work. The committee meeting. Six days of silence. Then Callum walking through the door of the paper office with a folder and both my names in his mouth like he had been practicing them.
I stared at those six days.
Six days between Aldridge telling them what I was working on and Callum appearing in my office. Six days was not long enough for a response to develop organically. Six days was long enough for Marcus to receive a flag, assess the situation, identify the fastest way to neutralize it, and send someone.
Send someone.
I put the pen down.
Picked it back up.
Put it down again.
The arrangement had been Callum's idea. He had come to me with a folder and a proposition and I had spent four days deciding and then signed my name next to his on a notepad and told myself it was professional and documented and that I had gone in with both eyes open. And I had. I had been careful and specific and completely clear about what I was agreeing to.
But I had not known what had sent him to my door.
I had not known because he had not told me. He had told me about the bet pool and the surveillance and his father's general method of operation. He had not told me that six days before he walked into my office, my academic advisor had flagged my story pipeline to the network connected to his father.
He might not have known.
That was the part I kept arriving at and kept not being able to stay at because not knowing and not telling were different things but they produced the same outcome, which was that I had been sitting across from him for three weeks building something I had decided to trust and I did not have the full picture of how it started.
I picked up my phone.
Dialed his number.
He picked up on the second ring. "Hey. I was about to call you, Jamie sent me the screenshot of the Aldridge email and I think we need to talk about what it means for the timeline bec—"
"Did your father send you to me," I said.
Silence.
Not the thinking silence or the processing silence. A different kind. The kind that had a specific shape to it, a contained quality, like something being held very carefully to prevent it from moving in the wrong direction.
One second.
Two.
Three.
Four.
"Not the way you think," he said.
His voice was even when he said it. Not defensive, not performing calm, just level in the way it went level when he was saying something he had prepared to say and was trying to say it accurately.
"I will explain everything," he said. "But I need to do it in person. Not on the phone."
I looked at the timeline on the page in front of me. The straight line with six days of silence between Aldridge's flag and Callum's arrival at my door.
"Tonight," I said.
"Yes. Wherever you want."
I named a place he hadn't been before, a study room in the humanities block that required a booking code, the same kind of room we had used when he told me about Dex. A room that needed a code. A room where nobody wandered in.
I booked it under a different name and texted him the code and put the phone down and looked at the timeline again.
Not the way you think.
That sentence had four possible meanings and I had already run through all of them twice by the time I picked up my pen again. The most charitable version was that Marcus had mentioned my name to Callum without full context and Callum had acted independently. The least charitable version was one I was not ready to write on the page yet because writing it made it more real than I could currently afford for it to be.
I wrote four questions in the notebook. Specific, direct, the kind that didn't allow answers to slide around the edges of the truth. The kind I would ask a source who had given me good information for three weeks and who I had reason to believe was also withholding something.
Because that was what this was now.
Callum was a source who was withholding something.
The fact that he was also something harder to categorise, the cup switched when hers went cold, the sitting on the bench in the dark, the what do you need, the fourteen seconds of Marcus's voice that Callum had listened to with his jaw tight, all of that was real and I was not going to pretend it wasn't but it was also not the thing I could lead with right now.
The thing I had to lead with was the question.
Did your father send you to me.
Not the way you think.
My laptop pinged. An email from the press freedom organisation acknowledging receipt of the recording file and confirming the timestamp documentation was clear and legally usable.
Good. That was one thing secured.
I closed the laptop and picked up the notebook with the four questions and my jacket from the back of the chair and left for the humanities block forty minutes earlier than I needed to because sitting in the apartment waiting felt like something I could not do right now.
The corridor outside the study room was empty when I arrived.
I went in and sat down and put the notebook on the table and looked at the four questions.
The door opened twelve minutes later.
Callum came in and looked at my face and did not sit down immediately, just stood at the door for a moment, and the look on his face was the one I had seen at the library entrance, unguarded, the version underneath the composed one, except this time it had something else in it that I couldn't immediately name.
He sat down.
"My father called me five weeks ago," he said, before I could open the notebook. "He said your name."