[PPTH Diagnostics Conference Room — September 20, 2005, 8:15 AM]
Cameron came out of Interview Room A with her mascara intact and her composure shattered.
Isaac was in the hallway — not waiting, technically, but positioned at the water fountain three doors down in a way that gave him a clear sightline to the interview room's exit. Cameron emerged at 8:15, twenty-five minutes after entering, and the transformation was visible from forty feet. Her posture had collapsed inward — shoulders curved, arms crossed at the waist, the protective geometry of a woman who'd been taken apart by someone who knew which screws to turn.
She walked past Isaac without looking at him. Her shoes — the low heels she wore on clinic days, the ones that made a specific rhythm on the linoleum that the Memory Palace had catalogued months ago — struck the floor with uneven cadence. Off-balance. Hurrying without running.
Isaac let her pass. Followed at a distance. She turned into the women's restroom on the second floor, and the door swung shut behind her with the pneumatic hiss of institutional plumbing.
He waited. Three minutes. Five. When Cameron emerged, her mascara was still intact — she hadn't been crying, or she'd fixed it — but her jaw carried the locked tension of someone who'd bitten down on something hard enough to crack a tooth.
"Cameron."
She stopped. Turned. The professional distance she'd maintained since January — the amicable boundary, the courteous separation — wavered. For a moment, Social Deduction read something older underneath: the Cameron who'd offered him coffee on his first morning, the woman who'd wanted to see the person behind the doctor. That Cameron was scared, and the fear was leaking through the professional veneer.
"He had my record." Cameron's voice was low. Not whispering — controlling volume, the way you do when the thing you're saying is too heavy for normal speech. "From before medical school. I was— there was an incident in college. A protest. I got arrested. Charges dropped. It was supposed to be sealed."
"Tritter unsealed it?"
"Tritter had it. Like he'd been building a file before the interview started." Cameron's arms tightened across her body. "He didn't use it directly. He just... mentioned it. Casually. Like making conversation. 'I see you had some trouble in your early twenties.' And then he asked about House's prescribing patterns, and the connection was—" She stopped. Swallowed. "He was showing me that he could dig. That nobody's past is sealed if he wants it open."
Isaac leaned against the corridor wall. The plaster was cool through his shirt — September warmth outside, permanent institutional chill inside. "What did you tell him?"
"The truth. That House takes Vicodin. That he prescribes it through Wilson. That I've observed him impaired during clinic hours." Cameron's expression hardened. The fear resolving into something more familiar — the moral certainty that had defined her character since the show's first season. "I'm not going to lie to a police officer, Isaac. Not even for House."
"Nobody's asking you to lie."
"House is asking me to lie. Not directly — he'd never be that straightforward. But the team's strategy is 'don't volunteer information,' which is just lying by omission, and Tritter knows the difference." Cameron uncrossed her arms. The posture shift was deliberate — she was done being scared, transitioning to the version of herself that processed fear through principle. "I answered his questions honestly. If that causes problems, the problems existed before I opened my mouth."
She walked away. The heels found their rhythm again — steady now, purposeful, Cameron at her most composed, which meant Cameron at her most dangerous, because Cameron's honesty was a weapon she wielded without malice and without mercy.
---
[PPTH Fourth Floor — 11:30 AM]
Foreman's interview lasted forty minutes, and he emerged with his expression sealed.
Not blank — Foreman didn't do blank the way Chase did, the Australian's survival mask of calculated emptiness. Foreman's seal was deliberate, architectural — the face of a man who'd built a wall during the interview and was maintaining it through sheer force of neurological discipline.
He walked to the conference room without speaking to anyone. Sat at the table. Opened his laptop. The typing was aggressive — each keystroke a controlled impact, the keyboard absorbing whatever the interview had produced that Foreman's expression wouldn't release.
Isaac entered five minutes later with two coffees — Nassau Street cart, the routine that had become his professional currency. He set one in front of Foreman without comment. The gesture was the same one Cameron had made on Isaac's first morning, almost a year ago: an offering, a signal of solidarity, the social language of hot beverages in institutional settings.
Foreman took the coffee. Drank. Didn't look up.
"He asked about my juvenile record," Foreman said. The words came out flat, compressed, each one carrying weight that the delivery refused to acknowledge. "Breaking and entering. Car theft. I was sixteen. The records were supposed to be expunged."
The pattern was clear. Tritter wasn't just investigating House's Vicodin use — he was building pressure profiles on each team member, leveraging sealed records and personal histories to establish that everyone around House had vulnerabilities that could be exploited. The strategy was textbook police work: identify weaknesses, apply pressure, wait for someone to provide the testimony needed to build the primary case.
"He's not interested in your past," Isaac said. "He's interested in making you think he's interested in your past. The leverage is the threat, not the information."
Foreman's typing stopped. He looked up. The sealed expression cracked — not fully, not dramatically, but enough for Social Deduction to read the conflicted terrain underneath: anger at the violation, professional calculation about its implications, and a deep, old fear that lived in the same place as the sixteen-year-old who'd been arrested and had spent his entire adult life running from the sound of handcuffs.
"I know what he's doing." Foreman's voice carried an edge that Isaac hadn't heard before — not the measured professional authority of the diagnostic conference room, but something rawer, something that belonged to the kid from the wrong neighborhood who'd clawed his way into medicine and was now watching a cop dismantle the walls he'd built. "I grew up knowing what cops do. The question is whether knowing helps."
"It helps if you don't give him anything he can use."
"I didn't." Foreman returned to his laptop. The typing resumed, slightly less aggressive. "But Cameron did."
---
Chase was the last to be interviewed, and his emergence was the most alarming because it was the most normal.
He walked out of Interview Room A at 2:45 PM, collected his coat from the hook, and headed for the cafeteria with the unhurried gait of a man who'd just completed a routine administrative task. No tension. No sealed expression. No visible disturbance. The Australian's composure was so complete that it constituted its own red flag — a man who'd been interrogated by a police detective and emerged looking like he'd been discussing the weather was either supremely confident or had already made his deal.
Isaac watched Chase from the fourth-floor window. The cafeteria was visible from this angle — the glass walls that Vogler had praised for their "transparency" and that Isaac had learned to use as a surveillance network. Chase bought a sandwich. Sat alone. Ate. His phone was on the table, screen up, and Isaac — even at this distance, even without Transparent World — could see the periodic glow of incoming messages.
Wilson was the one Isaac worried about most.
The oncologist hadn't been formally interviewed yet — Tritter was saving him, the way a chess player saves the attack on the king for after the pawns have been cleared. But the pressure was constant and indirect. Wilson's prescription pad was under review. His pharmacy records had been subpoenaed. His bank accounts — not yet frozen, but flagged for monitoring — represented the financial leverage that Tritter would eventually deploy.
Isaac found Wilson in his office at 4:30 PM. The oncologist was sitting at his desk, staring at a prescription pad that lay in the center of his workspace like an artifact from a crime scene. The pad was unused — fresh, clean, the top sheet blank. But Wilson was looking at it the way a recovering alcoholic looks at an open bottle: with the awareness that the object itself was innocent and the damage was in the using.
"Hey." Isaac knocked on the open door. Wilson looked up, and Social Deduction delivered the assessment without being asked: exhaustion, anxiety, the specific loneliness of a man whose best friend was the cause of his legal jeopardy.
"He's going to ask me to testify." Wilson's voice was flat. Not defeated — processed. The voice of a man who'd run the calculations and reached the conclusion he'd been avoiding. "Tritter. He's going to put me in a room and ask me to confirm that I wrote prescriptions for House that I knew were being abused. And the answer is yes. I did. I knew, and I wrote them anyway, because House is my friend and friends don't let friends suffer."
"That's not testimony, Wilson. That's a confession."
"It's the truth." Wilson pushed the prescription pad to the edge of the desk, away from his hands, the physical rejection of an object that had become toxic. "Cameron told the truth this morning. I'll tell it when they ask. The question is what happens to House after."
Isaac sat in the visitor's chair. The same chair he'd occupied during the conversation about House's notebook, months ago, in a different season of both the year and the crisis. Wilson's office was warm — oncology warm, the permanent setting that prioritized patient comfort. The warmth felt like a lie today.
"What happens to House is House's responsibility," Isaac said. "Your job is to tell the truth without volunteering more than what's asked. Answer the questions. Don't interpret. Don't explain. Don't offer context that hasn't been requested."
"That's what you told the team before the Vogler audit." Wilson looked at him with the particular sharpness that appeared when the oncologist's diagnostic mind turned from cancer to people. "You gave us the same speech. Almost word for word."
Isaac's strategy for surviving institutional investigation — landed with the specific discomfort of being caught in a pattern. Isaac had given the same advice twice because the advice was correct both times, but the repetition revealed something about Isaac's relationship with institutional threats: he'd navigated them before, smoothly, successfully, and the smoothness was the kind of thing that perceptive people noticed.
"Good advice bears repeating," Isaac said.
"Good advice from someone who always seems to know what's coming." Wilson's tone wasn't accusatory. It was tired. The tiredness of a man who'd spent months accepting his friend's mystery and was now watching that mystery operate in real time, efficiently, effectively, with the competence of someone who'd done this before. "I won't push, Isaac. I never push. But Tritter will, and Tritter doesn't stop."
Isaac stood. "I know."
"You always know." Wilson pulled the prescription pad back to the center of his desk. Picked up a pen. The gesture wasn't compliance — it was defiance. The oncologist returning to work despite the investigation, despite the pressure, despite the specific terror of a man whose professional tool had been weaponized against him. "Go prep for your interview. And for the love of God, don't be too calm. Tritter notices calm."
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