She has stopped pretending the board is about the pharmaceutical story.
It is about Gideon Vale. It has been about Gideon Vale since the night she pinned the press badge to the blue section, and the pharmaceutical story is the frame she has been putting around it so that she can keep working it without having to fully reckon with what working it means.
She sits cross-legged on her bed on a Sunday morning with coffee and her laptop, and she makes herself say it out loud, which is a practice she has — saying the difficult thing out loud, to the room, because hearing it in her own voice is the most honest test of whether she actually believes it.
"I think Gideon Vale is the Surgeon of Sin," she says.
Witness, on the pillow beside her, makes no particular comment.
"I have his prints. I have seven deaths that match the methodology. I have the timeline. I have the specific way he went still when I mentioned the supply chain." She looks at the cat. "I don't have anything a newspaper can run."
She opens the laptop.
The question she has been circling for three months, the one she keeps approaching from the outside and then pulling back from, is not whether she can prove it. The question is: even if she could prove it — what does she do with it?
She is a journalist. The answer is, structurally, obvious. You publish. You take the story to your editor. You document your sourcing, you go through legal review, you publish.
That is the answer if the story is about a politician's corruption, a corporation's negligence, an institution's failure.
She is not sure it is the same answer when the story is about a man who has been killing violent criminals and who has, by her own careful accounting, killed no one who was not one.
She does not say this to anyone. She does not say it to Merritt, who would remind her — correctly — that her job is not to decide who deserves to be killed. She does not say it to Janet, who would look at her with the specific patience of a woman who spent years in the aftermath of assault and would understand the hesitation in a way that would not actually help her resolve it.
She says it to Witness, who blinks once and looks at the window.
"I know," she says.
She opens the file she has been building. She reads what she has.
She still does not have enough.
But she is getting closer, and closer means a decision is coming, and the decision is going to require something from her that she has not yet figured out how to give.
She closes the laptop. She finishes her coffee.
She goes for a walk.