Chapter 160: The Others

POV: Riley

I texted the number scrawled at the bottom of the note that evening, the one small detail Preethi had included beneath her message, and asked if she would be willing to meet. She replied within minutes. Tomorrow. Somewhere quiet.

We met at a small café two streets off campus, the kind of place students rarely chose because it was slightly too far to be convenient and slightly too expensive to be habitual, which made it exactly the right kind of place for a conversation that needed privacy. I arrived first and chose a table near the back, away from the window, and watched the door until a young woman came in looking around carefully before her eyes settled on me.

She was tall, dressed in the practical, slightly tired way of a final-year medical student who spent most of her waking hours in either lecture halls or hospital wards, and she sat down across from me with the particular caution of someone who had spent a long time deciding whether to come at all.

“Riley,” she said. “Thank you for meeting me.”

“Preethi,” I said, having gotten her name from the message exchange. “Thank you for the note. That took courage.”

She gave a short laugh that had no real humour in it. “I’ve been trying to find that courage for almost three years. I’m sorry it took me this long.”

“Tell me what happened,” I said. “Whatever you’re comfortable sharing.”

She wrapped both hands around her coffee cup before she started, the way people sometimes did when they needed something physical to hold onto while they said something difficult.

“My grandmother died at the end of my second year,” she said. “It hit me harder than I expected. I went to the welfare office because everyone kept telling me that’s what it was there for. Dr. Voss saw me herself. She was kind. Patient. She asked good questions, the kind that made it easy to talk.” She paused. “I told her things I hadn’t told anyone else. About my family. About how my grandmother’s death connected to other losses we’d had. About how exhausted I was carrying the expectation of being the first doctor in my family while also falling apart inside.”

I listened without interrupting.

“Six months later,” she continued, “I was up for a competitive clinical placement. Limited spots, heavily contested. I didn’t get it. The faculty member reviewing placements mentioned, almost in passing, that there had been some concern flagged about my emotional resilience under sustained pressure, given my documented history of bereavement-related difficulty.” She looked up at me. “I had never told that faculty member anything about my grandmother. I had only told Dr. Voss. In a session that was supposed to be confidential.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe I was wrong about how confidential the sessions actually were. I thought maybe there was some standard information-sharing protocol I didn’t understand. I told myself a dozen different explanations that let me avoid believing what I actually believed, which was that something I shared in trust had been used against me.” She shook her head slightly. “I’ve carried that for two and a half years without saying it out loud to anyone.”

“Why now?” I asked.

“Because of the article,” she said. “Because of everything that’s come out about Holt and the operation and now Voss’s name attached to it. I read it three times before I let myself believe it confirmed what I already suspected.” She looked at me directly. “And because I heard you stood up for Agatha in that competition room. Because I heard what your group has been doing all year. I thought, if there was ever a moment where telling someone would actually mean something, it was now.”

I reached across the table and put my hand briefly over hers.

“Thank you,” I said. “I mean that completely.”

Over the following two days, through whatever network existed among students who had quietly suspected something was wrong with that office and had never had a place to put the suspicion, three more came forward.

The first was a second-year engineering student who had disclosed financial difficulties at home during a welfare session and later discovered that a hardship fund application he submitted had been quietly flagged as a candidate for monitoring due to risk factors that exactly mirrored language he had used in that private session, language no application form should have contained any record of.

The second was a fourth-year art history student who had disclosed a difficult relationship with an absent parent and had subsequently been approached, with unsettling specificity, by a research project recruiter whose questions seemed to know exactly which emotional pressure points would make participation feel meaningful to her.

The third was a third-year I had never met, a quiet, careful young woman named Mara who arrived at our meeting with Jess sitting beside me for support, visibly more nervous than the others had been.

“I want to tell you something,” Mara said. “I’ve been turning this over for a long time, trying to decide if it even mattered, if it connected to anything. But after I read what you and the others have been finding, I think it does.”

“Take your time,” I said.

She breathed in slowly.

“I went to the welfare office in my first year,” she said. “Eighteen months ago. Family stress, the usual reasons people end up there. Dr. Voss ran the session.” She paused. “Partway through, she asked me about other students I knew. Specific names. People in my social circle, people on my course.” She looked down at the table. “She asked about Kai Rossi.”

I felt something go very still in my chest.

“What did she ask?” I said carefully.

“She asked how well I knew him,” Mara said. “Whether he had a steady relationship at the time. Whether he seemed emotionally stable. Whether his hockey commitments seemed to be affecting his personal wellbeing.” She looked up at me. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I barely knew him myself, just from a couple of shared social events. I gave vague answers and the session moved on to other things and I forgot about it completely until this week.”

“Eighteen months ago,” I repeated slowly.

“Yes,” Mara said.

I did the calculation in my head, the same calculation I had already done once with Jess weeks earlier when we first found the email chain between Voss and Holt, the one that predated his appointment by exactly that length of time. Eighteen months ago, before I had ever enrolled at this university, before any of this had begun for me, Voss had already been asking specific, pointed questions about Kai.

About his emotional state…About his relationships. About his vulnerabilities, in the careful, clinical language of someone building a file long before there was any visible reason to build one.

I sat across from Mara with the quiet café noise continuing around us and understood, with a cold clarity that settled somewhere deep in my chest, that this had never been only about me.

It had started with him..