Chapter 27 Priya's Evidence

Chapter 27 Priya's Evidence
POV: Lila Monroe

The number on my phone was not one I recognised and the message it had sent was four words, which I read twice before the full meaning of them arrived.
We need to talk.
No name. No context. Just those four words from an unknown number at eight in the morning precisely while I was sitting at Ryder's kitchen table with a plate of eggs I had not finished and a decision I had made twenty minutes ago that was already changing the weight of everything.
I looked at the message. I looked at the plate. I made a choice.
"Someone sent me a message," I said.
Ryder, who had been leaning against the counter with his own coffee, looked at me.
I showed him the screen.
He looked at it for a moment. "Unknown number."
"Yes."
"Same as before."
"Different pattern," I said. "This is four words. Before it was a photo."
He set down his cup. "Do you want to reply."
"Not yet," I said. "I want to know who it is first."
I did not reply. I went back to the table and finished the eggs, which were better than I would have made them, and I did not think about the message on my phone at all, which meant that I thought about essentially nothing else for the entire duration of the meal and the walk back to the counter and the moment I put the plate in the sink.
At nine I left Ryder's apartment and walked to the clinic to confirm the deposit, which took eleven minutes on the phone and left me standing on the pavement outside the building with the deposit reference number in my notebook and the unknown message still on my screen. I looked at it for a moment and then typed: Who is this.
No response for eleven minutes. Then: A friend. Call me.
I did not call.
I went back to my room and opened my laptop and ran the number through three different reverse-lookup tools, which returned nothing definitive, which told me it was either a burner or a number registered to something institutional rather than a person.
Institutional. I had not considered that possibility before.
I put my phone in my bag and spent two hours on other things. The conduct file follow-up, which needed one more document submitted. A paper draft that was two days behind. A confirmation message to Eli's clinic. Ordinary work, the kind that kept the surface of the day looking normal even when the underneath was not.
At noon my phone rang. Not the unknown number. Jade, who never called me in the middle of the day unless something had happened that she considered urgent enough to talk about rather than text.
"There is something going around," she said, before I had said anything.
"What kind of something."
"Someone sent a tip to the campus paper. I heard it from a girl in my tutorial who is friends with one of the editors. They are working on a story."
I was quiet.
"It is about you," Jade said. "And apparently some kind of forum."
I did not move.
"Not the actual posts," she said, quickly. "They don't have the posts. They have evidence the forum existed and that you were on it. Screenshots of the forum landing page and some metadata, nothing specific."
"Where did this come from," I said.
"That is what I do not know."
I thanked her and hung up and sat at my desk and understood very clearly that the message this morning had been from the journalist. The we need to talk was not a threat, it was a request for comment, and the reason I had not recognised it as that immediately was that journalists requesting comment from private individuals usually identified themselves.
Unless they had been told not to, because the person who had provided the tip had specifically requested that Lila Monroe not be contacted directly until the story was further along.
Which meant someone had managed the process. Someone had given the tip to the campus paper and had thought carefully about how to maximise the impact, and the only person in my immediate orbit who had the social awareness and the motivation to do something like that was someone who understood the campus media landscape well enough to use it.
I opened my contacts and looked at Priya's number, which I had taken after the terms meeting and never used.
I thought about the way she had said interesting on the path and the way she had come to the library to warn me and the way she had said I don't know what game you're running, but I'll find out.
She had been finding out for weeks, probably, running it methodically the way people with resources and patience did, and she had found enough.
I texted Ryder: "Campus paper has a tip about the forum. Not the posts themselves. Existence and my usage. Do you know who the journalist is."
He responded in under three minutes: "Kieran Mwangi. Third year. Ambitions."
Then: "He is good. He checks his sources."
Then: "He will call me."
I was still looking at those three messages when my phone rang again and Ryder's name was on the screen.
"He just called," Ryder said.
"What did you say."
"Nothing useful. I asked him to confirm the source of the tip and he said he was not at liberty to disclose that. I told him I had no comment at this time and ended the call."
"Did he say when the story is running."
"He said he had a few more sources to confirm before publication. My estimate is forty-eight hours, maybe less if his editor is pushing."
I calculated quickly. The deposit had already been made. The scholarship review was closed. Marcus was gone. If the story ran with what they had, which was the existence of the forum and my use of it, there was no specific evidence of any transaction and nothing that rose above the level of implication. It was still manageable.
Priya had worked out something real and had gone to the campus paper with what she had rather than attempting to use it directly or privately, which meant she wanted the damage to be public, which was a different kind of move from leverage and required a different kind of response.
My phone buzzed.
One word from Ryder: "Run."
I was already moving toward the door before I had fully registered that I stood up.