Chapter 1
Nora
“You want me to what?”
Nora stared at Matisse, Seok, Ryan, Apollo, and Cai. They sat at their round kitchen table, gazes steady.
She’d been hoodwinked. Erik Bismarck, her lawyer and Ryan’s former professor, said he was stopping by to check in on her. He didn’t say that while he was here, he was going to lob a bomb.
Narrowing her eyes, she studied her boyfriends, none of whom seemed surprised.
Bamboozled. They’d bamboozled her.
Professor Bismarck folded his hands on the table. “I want you to do an interview with Lucy Merrill for the online paper The Digger. In the months you were gone, things with Dr. Murray escalated. Charges will more than likely be brought against him and the other doctors. His medical license has already been suspended, but he and his lawyers have been in the forefront of every paper and online journal there is.”
“Why me?” she asked. “There were other people in his study.”
“All of them were still enrolled in the study,” Ryan answered. His green eyes were kind and serious and held hers. “The court has ordered them not to speak with anyone. You, on the other hand, are sort of a free agent.”
“An easy target, you mean.” Nora rubbed her forehead and dropped her hand to the table. On the back of her hand, purple lines crisscrossed her skin. She stretched her fingers, watching how her pinky and ring finger didn’t really straighten. After her motorcycle accident over Thanksgiving, they probably never would, no matter how much occupational therapy she did.
“If you want to call it that.” Bismarck didn’t mince words. “He’s trying to deflect attention away from him and his study and put it back on you. It’s not fair. It’s not right.”
“All of this will come out in a trial,” she argued, gaze landing on each guy.
Matisse shrugged one shoulder. “One would hope.”
“Yes,” Bismarck agreed. “We hope. But there’s no guarantee. And not to sound crass, but shit rolls downhill. Ryan is about to start law school at CCSL—”
“Erik,” Ryan interrupted. “I don’t need her to do an interview for me. That wasn’t what we talked about.”
“Well, you should have thought about that, Valore. You have to think about perception now.”
Seok stood so fast his chair scraped against the floor. “I am the only one responsible for my actions. Nora owes us nothing. Relying on public favor is foolish. Their opinion changes from one second to the next, and nothing she does will change that. We stick to the facts. Nora is a hero. During a school shooting, she saved lives. After that, people with more power than her tried to take advantage of her position. The end.” He pushed his hands through his hair, leaving them linked behind him as he glared at the rest of them.
If she had been in Seok’s position—if he were the one being asked to talk to the public in order to salvage their reputations—she would say the same thing. She would say, “Don’t worry about me. I can handle it. All that matters is you.”
But that wasn’t her position. In her position, she actually appreciated Bismarck outmaneuvering her and the guys.
She’d do whatever it took to make sure the guys weren’t affected by the poor choice she’d made when she agreed to join Dr. Daniel Murray’s study.
“I’ll do it.” Forcing a smile she didn’t feel, she met all their stares. Ryan shook his head, Matisse leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, and glared. Apollo pulled his glasses off his face and flung them onto the table. Cai showed no emotion, but the muscle near his ear ticked, a sure sign of his discomfort.
And Seok. Seok watched her with the saddest expression she’d ever seen. “You’re not responsible for what people think, nae sereang.”
No. But she was responsible for them. They were a gift, and she’d do anything to make their lives easier—better. Just like they’d do for her.
“Your foster brother worked with Dr. Daniel Murray. What sort of work did he do?”
The lights were hot. So hot that the back of Nora’s neck burned. She stared at the woman, —a journalist who wrote for an online paper and had broken the news about Dr. Murray’s study months earlier—trying to formulate her answer. Lucy Merrill was trustworthy. Nora and Ryan had given her the USB drive where Matisse had saved all the information he could find on Dr. Murray’s study.
She’d published it, and everything had changed.
Nora’s entire world had turned upside down, but not just because of what the public knew. After the motorcycle accident, for a while, Dr. Murray and the fallout he’d created had gone to the back burner.
But now she was back in Vermont and people were clamoring for her attention. Journalists, the police, the university—everyone wanted to talk to her. They wanted first-hand accounts of what she’d experienced.
At first, Nora had let the guys run interference. Matisse, Ryan, Seok, Cai, and Apollo had taken messages and made excuses. They’d sat with her while the Brownington PD interviewed her. And now two of them, Ryan Valore and Seok Jheon stood outside the bright lights and watched right along with Professor Bismarck.
“Nora?” Lucy prompted.
Her leg ached. The walking cast was off now, had been for a few weeks, but she was still weak. She pointed her toes, stretching, but it did little to ease the throbbing.
“I don’t know what Reid’s work with Dr. Murray turned into,” she said, “but I imagine it started the same as mine.”
Lucy nodded. “I know you’re not able to go into much detail about Reid, given that you’re under a court order not to say anything until—or if—the doctors in this study are charged, but I’m curious about what happened to you in the beginning. I think a lot of people are.”
Over Lucy’s shoulder, Ryan nodded, signaling that this was a question she could answer. “In the beginning, all I had to do was answer questions about how I saw the world. Was it a hopeful place? Did I believe in fate? I had to take an IQ test. A Rorschach test—is that how you say it?”
“Yes,” she answered. “The inkblot test.”
“Yes.” Nora clasped her hands on her lap, entwining her fingers and squeezing. She resisted the urge to crack her knuckles. “Those sorts of things.”
“Those are all pretty typical tests in a psychological study.” The reporter glanced down at a notebook on her lap. “Were the results of those tests ever shared with you?”
She shook her head. “Sometimes one of the doctors would share a detail or two they gleaned from the tests, but I was never shown anything comprehensive.”
“How do you feel about knowing all of this information will be public knowledge if charges are brought?”
Nora swallowed. Ryan wasn’t looking at her anymore. His gaze was trained on Seok Jheon, his expression unreadable. Lucy’s question bothered Nora in a lot of ways, but the main one was this—if all of the details of Dr. Murray’s study were revealed, then all of the details she had shared about her personal life would be shared. And the main detail, the one that affected more than just her, had to do with her relationships.