Chapter 9: The Patient Who Lived
The letter arrived at 12:43 in the morning, and Rhea Malik — who had spent six hours being unmoveable at that table — read the sender's name and stopped moving in a completely different way.
That frightened me more than anything else that night had.
By then the celebration had turned into an all-night board session. The caterers were carrying out untouched desserts through one door while a second firm of lawyers came in through the service entrance. Outside on the plaza the reporters had settled in properly, the way they do, with coffee and folding stools.
"What is it?"
She turned her phone face down on the table. "Counsel for a former study participant."
Celeste's head came round toward Nathan so fast it was almost an answer in itself.
"Which participant?" Anneke said.
"I need her permission before I name her in this room."
Rhea stepped out to make the call and came back four minutes later with an authorisation so narrow it was almost a refusal: the name, the fact that a written inquiry existed, and nothing whatsoever about her present health beyond what she had chosen to state herself.
She looked at me before she said it, which is how I knew.
"Leah Morgan."
For five years that woman had been Participant 014 to me. A number in a sealed report. The reason every conversation about my work ended the way it ended. Sterling told me that privacy rules prohibited any contact, and then revoked my access, and then published its findings, and then used my name as the explanation for what had happened to her.
Nobody ever told me what became of her after she left the site.
I have made a great many assumptions in five years, in the dark, at four in the morning, and I had stopped letting myself finish most of them.
"She's alive?"
My voice arrived from somewhere outside my body.
"She is alive," Rhea said. "Her letter says she has recovered enough to decide what she wants to ask."
I closed my eyes for a moment and put both hands flat on the table.
Relief is not innocence. Her being alive does not make a single altered field smaller. But there was a door somewhere inside me that had been shut since the eleventh phone call, and it came open far enough to let some air through, and I had to sit with that for a second in front of eleven people.
I rang the study office eleven times after they removed me. The first three calls reached people who knew my voice. The next eight were routed to legal. And then Nathan told me — carefully, reasonably, in the tone — that continued attempts at contact could be characterised as interference with a participant, and might harm her, and might harm me.
I stopped calling. I stopped because protecting her mattered more to me than defending myself, and because he knew that about me, and I have thought a great deal since about which of those two facts he was using.
Five years later, Leah Morgan had to hire her own lawyer to ask whether I had signed off on what was done to her.
Celeste folded her arms. "Sterling maintained appropriate contact through the study team."
"Her attorney disputes that characterisation," Rhea said, in a voice that had gone several degrees cooler, "and has documents."
Nathan asked for the letter.
"No. Not until this board adopts a confidentiality protocol that excludes public relations entirely and limits distribution by name."
"I am the chief legal officer of this company."
"And your name is in the custody history of the missing file. Sit down, Mr. Cole."
He sat down.
Anneke had Ms. Vale open a restricted record. Celeste objected to being excluded from material concerning her own programme.
"It was my programme then," I said.
"And look how that turned out."
It came out fast and it came out mean, and my father turned his head toward her, and she did not take it back.
I could have answered it. I had the whole timeline by then — the 2:17 entry was still an hour away from being found, but I had the badge logs and the archive receipt and I could have made her look very stupid in front of eleven directors.
Leah Morgan's privacy was worth more to me than that minute was. It still is.
"Follow her conditions exactly," I told Rhea. "Whatever she's asked for, she gets."
My father stood up, as though a patient's inquiry were an interruption to be delegated to somebody two floors down.
"Sit down, Conrad," Anneke said.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he sat.
I have been in rooms with that man for thirty-four years and it is the only time I have ever seen him take a direct instruction inside a building with his name on it.
The letter went onto Anneke's secure tablet and nowhere else. She read it in silence for about ninety seconds, and her face did nothing at all, and then she authorised exactly one paragraph to be read into the record.
Rhea read it in Leah's own words, because Leah's lawyer had required that too.
Five years ago, a company representative had told her that Dr. Evelyn Sterling personally approved a revised study plan. She had later seen a public statement saying the same thing. She was now asking for that to be confirmed or denied by someone independent of Sterling Biotech.
My hands were flat on the table and I kept them there.
I never approved a revised plan.
I asked for a pause. In writing, twice, and the second time I copied in the safety committee, which is the thing that started all of it.
My father was looking at the tabletop. Nathan was reading the restricted-record notice as though it contained something. Celeste reached toward the crown and then seemed to catch herself doing it and put her hand back in her lap.
Rhea read the final line Leah had authorised.
"I am not asking who is sorry. I am asking who changed the form."