Chapter 57 Another Bait
It took her two days to work out the details, and another day to convince herself it wasn’t completely reckless.
The plan was simple on its surface and complicated underneath, the way all of their plans seemed to be. Mia was going to force Elara’s hand to move. She was going to show her the forensic file.
Not the real one. A version of it, enough to be credible, not enough to expose everything they actually had. She was going to walk into Elara’s orbit looking frightened, which was easy because she was frightened, and she was going to perform the role of someone who’d stumbled onto something they didn’t understand and were now terrified of the consequences.
The hard part was that it had to be believable. Elara was sharp, and she’d already been watching Mia closely enough to notice things nobody else would catch. If there was even a hint of calculation in Mia’s performance, it was over.
She chose her moment carefully.
A Thursday afternoon, the quiet hour after lunch when Elara usually sat in the campus courtyard to read, because Elara read in public the way she did everything in public, decoratively and with full awareness of her surroundings. Mia found her there, on the bench by the fountain, book open, sunlight on her hair.
Mia approached slowly. She’d spent twenty minutes before this sitting on the floor of her dorm bathroom practicing scared, going over it the way she used to practice lines for drama club. The specific kind of scared she needed wasn’t full panic. It was the worse kind, the quiet, contained fear of someone who’d been trying very hard not to show it and was only barely holding together.
“Elara.” She sat down without being invited, which was intentional. “I need to talk to you.”
Elara looked up with warm surprise. “Mia. Of course, what’s wrong?”
Mia reached into her bag and pulled out a folded printout. She set it on the bench between them, smoothing it down with fingers that trembled just slightly. The document was a photograph of the technician’s worksheet, the real one, but printed at a resolution that made the specific compound notation illegible. The asterisk was still visible. The words recommend further analysis were still visible. That was enough.
“I found this,” Mia said, keeping her voice low. “I work in the forensic building on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I wasn’t looking for anything, I promise, I was just cleaning and the archival room was open and I saw a folder with a name on it that I recognized.” She let her breath catch slightly. “It was Ethan’s case file. And there’s something in the technician’s notes that isn’t in the official report. Something about a compound in his lungs that didn’t come from the lake water.”
She watched Elara’s face.
The warmth stayed in place. That was always the first thing, the warmth holding while everything underneath rearranged itself. Mia had gotten good at watching for the split second before it settled.
It was brief this time. A flicker of something cold and focused, gone so fast that if Mia hadn’t been specifically looking for it she would have missed it entirely.
“Oh, Mia,” Elara said, and her voice was full of gentle concern. “That must have been such a shock to find.”
“I don’t know what to do with it,” Mia said. She looked down at the printout, then back up. “I’m scared. If someone changed that report, someone with authority, someone connected to the school. And I found it.” She let the implication hang. “I feel like I need to tell someone, but I don’t know who to trust.”
“You can trust me,” Elara said immediately. She placed her hand over Mia’s on the bench, fingers cold as ever. “You did the right thing, coming to me.”
“I didn’t know who else to go to. You know everyone here. You know how things work.” Mia met her eyes with an expression of desperate relief. “I just don’t want anything to happen to me. If the right people find out I saw this…”
“Nothing is going to happen to you,” Elara said firmly. “I promise.” She picked up the printout and looked at it, her eyes moving across the page with careful attention. “This does look unusual. But you have to be very careful about who you show this to. These things can be misread. Someone might try to use you, to make it look like you were interfering with a closed case.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Mia said.
“Give this to me,” Elara said, folding the printout with neat, decisive hands. “I’ll look into it quietly. Through the right channels. People who can actually do something without it blowing back on you.” Her smile was warm and reassuring. “You’ve been through enough. Let me handle this.”
Mia nodded, slow and grateful, the picture of someone handing a problem to someone else and feeling the weight lift. “Thank you,” she said. “I really didn’t know what to do.”
“I know,” Elara said, tucking the folded paper into her own bag. “That’s what I’m here for.”
She squeezed Mia’s hand once more and steered the conversation gently toward easier things, the upcoming drama festival, a café she’d been meaning to try. Mia let herself be steered, answered in the right places, laughed softly at the right moments.
Underneath the performance, she watched Elara’s eyes.
They were warm and attentive and full of concern, and behind all of that, moving quietly like something swimming below the surface of still water, was the cold and patient calculation of someone who had just seen an opportunity and was already deciding how to use it.
Mia walked back to her dorm afterward and sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the wall for a while.
She’d handed Elara a thread that looked like a loose end and felt like a gift. She’d performed helplessness convincingly enough that Elara had believed it, had taken the bait with both hands and was already, somewhere in that precise and dangerous mind, deciding what to do about the girl who’d accidentally found something she shouldn’t have.
The question now wasn’t whether Elara would act.
It was how long she’d take to decide that another accident was the tidiest solution.