ARIA’S POV
It was Dr. Patel who told her.
Not intentionally. That was the thing that stayed with her afterward.....it wasn’t malicious, wasn’t gossip for the sake of it. Priya Patel was one of the good ones, had been since Aria’s first rotation, the kind of colleague who said what she ant and ant what she said and didn’t perform things she didn’t feel.
Which was why, when Priya stopped her in the corridor outside the nurses’ station on a Tuesday morning with an expression Aria had never seen on her face before, Aria knew imdiately that sothing had happened.
"Can we...." Priya looked at the corridor. At the nurses’ station. At the two junior doctors coming around the corner. "Can we go sowhere."
"Priya....."
"Sowhere private," Priya said. "Please."
The small family consultation room off the east corridor was empty.
Priya closed the door behind them and turned around and looked at Aria with the expression of a woman who had been deciding how to do this since probably last night and still hadn’t found the right way.
"There’s an article," she said.
Aria went very still.
"It went up last night. It’s been....it’s been circulating since this morning. Soone sent it to the departnt group chat and Morrison had it taken down but....." She stopped. "But it’s already...."
"Show ," Aria said.
"Aria...."
"Priya. Show ."
Priya took out her phone.
She turned it around.
Aria looked at the screen.
The publication was real. Not a tabloid, not a gossip site. A legitimate investigative outlet with a readership and a reputation....the kind of piece that got shared because it looked credible. The kind that carried weight.
The headline was nine words.
The Doctor, The Billionaire, and The Identity She Left Behind.
She read it.
She read it standing in the consultation room with Priya watching her face and the corridor sounds coming through the door and her hands completely steady because she’d made a decision sowhere in the first paragraph that she was going to read the whole thing before she felt anything about it.
She read the whole thing.
It was good.
That was what struck her first, before anything else. It was well written, well sourced, carefully structured. It didn’t lie. It didn’t fabricate. It didn’t reach for anything it couldn’t back up. It laid out the facts....the hacking, the corporate espionage, the jobs she’d taken through underground networks, the false identity she’d used to enter Damien Blackwood’s estate....with the calm, docunted precision of soone who had done their research.
All of it accurate.
Every word.
The article didn’t call her a fraud explicitly. Didn’t need to. It just asked questions. How does a woman with this history obtain a dical licence? What does it an for her patients? What does it an for the institution that employs her?
Questions that sounded reasonable.
Questions that didn’t need to be answered to do their damage.
She handed the phone back to Priya.
"How many people have seen it," she said.
"In the hospital?" Priya put the phone away. "I don’t know. Morrison is trying to contain it but...." She paused. "It was in the group chat, Aria. Most of the departnt."
"The group chat with the junior doctors."
"Yes."
Aria nodded.
She looked at the door. Through the small window in it she could see the corridor....nurses, a porter pushing a trolley, one of the junior doctors she’d been supervising for three weeks who glanced toward the consultation room and then looked away too quickly.
Already.
It had been one morning and already there was the looking away.
"Morrison wants to see you," Priya said. "He asked to find you when...." She stopped. "When I found you."
"He sent you."
"He thought it would be better coming from first." Priya held her gaze. "He’s not....Aria, Morrison is not the problem here. He’s furious about it. He’s been on the phone with legal since seven AM."
"I know," Aria said. "I know Morrison isn’t the problem."
She put her hand on the door.
"Are you alright," Priya said. Behind her. Quiet.
Aria stopped.
She thought about the honest answer. She ran through it quickly....what was actually happening in her chest right now, under the steadiness, under the composure she’d put on in the first paragraph of the article and hadn’t taken off since.
There was fear. She acknowledged it. The specific fear of watching sothing you’d built start to shake.
And underneath the fear, sothing else. Sothing that wasn’t quite anger but was adjacent to it. The cold, focused energy of a woman who had known this was coming and had been building toward it for weeks and was now standing at the mont she’d been preparing for.
"I’m fine," she said.
She opened the door and walked out into the corridor.
Morrison’s office felt smaller than usual.
He was behind his desk and he stood up when she ca in and pointed at the chair and said sit down and she sat. He looked like a man who had been awake since five AM and was running on the specific adrenaline of soone who was angry on soone else’s behalf.
"You’ve seen it," he said.
"Yes."
"The legal team is already on it. We’re looking at source disclosure, we’re looking at the publication’s verification process, we’re looking at every angle...."
"Morrison." She held up one hand. "What is the board doing."
He sat back.
"There’s been a preliminary inquiry request," he said. "This morning. Two board mbers." He t her eyes. "It’s standard procedure when sothing like this surfaces. It doesn’t an...."
"I know what it ans," she said.
"It’s preliminary. It doesn’t an...."
"It ans they have to ask," she said. "Regardless of the outco they have to go through the process and the process takes ti and while the process is happening everyone in this hospital knows it’s happening." She looked at him. "That’s the point. That’s exactly the point."
Morrison looked at her.
"You knew this was coming," he said. Quietly. Not an accusation.
"I suspected sothing like it," she said. "I didn’t know the tiline."
"How long."
"Three weeks. Maybe four." She folded her hands in her lap. "We’ve been trying to get ahead of it."
Morrison looked at his desk. At the file open in front of him. Then back at her.
"The information in the article," he said carefully. "The history it describes."
"Is accurate," she said.
He was quiet.
"All of it," she said. "I’m not going to sit here and tell you it isn’t because it is and you deserve to know that clearly." She held his gaze. "I was a hacker. I took jobs that were outside the law. I used a false identity to enter Damien Blackwood’s estate." She paused. "That’s who I was. It is not who I am and it is not who I’ve been in this hospital for the three years I’ve worked here, but it’s true and I’m not going to pretend otherwise."
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