Chapter Thirteen: The Call

Maya was released from the medical tent by evening, wrapped in two blankets she refused to give back and clutching a mug of hot chocolate the camp nurse had all but forced into her hands. Naomi sat across from her on the porch of the infirmary cabin, still faintly shivering herself, though the shaking now had more to do with adrenaline finally leaving her system than the cold.

"I panicked," Maya said, staring into the mug. "I did everything wrong. I lifted my head, I fought the chop instead of using it, I did the exact thing you spent a month telling us not to do."

"You're twelve," Naomi said. "And the water turned on you in about four seconds. Even athletes twice your age panic in conditions like that." She reached over and tapped the edge of Maya's mug until the girl looked up. "What matters isn't that you panicked. It's that you're sitting here telling me exactly what went wrong instead of pretending it didn't happen. That's the whole job, Maya. Knowing what broke so you can fix it before the next time."

"Will there be a next time?"

"There's always a next time," Naomi said. "That's not a threat. It's a promise. We'll drill recovery breathing next week. You'll be ready for it."

Maya managed a small, watery smile, and some of the tightness in Naomi's chest finally loosened.

She was still sitting there twenty minutes later, letting the quiet of the evening settle over the camp, when her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket — the cheap replacement she'd bought at the airport, the one she'd given the number to almost no one. Priya's name lit the screen.

Naomi almost let it go to voicemail. She hadn't spoken to Priya since the night before she left for the airport, a hurried, half-finished conversation neither of them had had time to close properly. But something about the hour, and the fact that Priya had found her new number at all, made her answer.

"Priya."

"I've been trying to reach you for two days." Priya's voice had none of its usual warmth — it was fast, urgent, pitched low like she didn't want to be overheard. "I know you're across an ocean living your new life and I am genuinely happy for you, but you need to hear this from me before you hear it from a headline."

Naomi stood and walked a few steps away from the infirmary porch, out toward the dark tree line. "Hear what."

"The merger's falling apart," Priya said. "The Calloways pulled out three days ago. Something about the divorce filing becoming public before the deal closed — it spooked their board, made the whole thing look messy and rushed. Julian's lawyers have been in crisis mode ever since."

Naomi felt something in her go very still, the same quiet stillness she remembered from the hotel lobby, overhearing Julian's voice behind an arrangement of flowers. "That was always going to happen the moment I filed. He knew that."

"That's the thing." Priya hesitated, and in the pause Naomi could hear the particular caution of a friend choosing her next words carefully. "It's worse than that. Without the merger, Sterling Group's stock took a hit nobody expected. There are already articles calling it his fault — reckless personal decisions, poor judgment, that kind of thing. He's trying to spin the story, Naomi. And from what I'm hearing, part of the spin involves you."

"Involves me how."

"There's talk of him wanting to paint the divorce as something you initiated impulsively. Emotionally. Because of your accident, your hand, your — and I'm quoting someone at his firm here, not myself — 'fragile state.' He's trying to make himself look like the wronged party. Patient husband, unstable wife, that whole narrative. If it gains traction, it could follow you. Federation boards read business press too."

Naomi stood in the dark for a long moment, the cold night air sharp in her lungs, and waited for the old, familiar flinch — the one that had lived in her for five years every time someone reduced her to her damaged hand, her damaged hand to her whole self. It didn't come. What rose instead was something colder and far more useful: clarity.

"He's not doing this because he believes it," she said slowly. "He's doing it because it's convenient. Same as always. My hand was never the real story. It was just the easiest lie to reach for."

"I know," Priya said. "I just didn't want you blindsided."

"I'm not blindsided." Naomi looked back toward the lights of the camp, toward the infirmary porch where Maya was still wrapped in her blankets, toward the dock where, hours earlier, she had pulled a child from a lake with the exact hand Julian was now trying to use against her. "Priya, I need you to do something for me. Quietly."

"Anything."

"Find out who's advising him on this. And find out if my lawyer still has that document — the one I started keeping, before I filed. Dates, quotes, the phone call in the hotel lobby. All of it."

There was a beat of silence on the line, and then, slowly, something like understanding. "You're not just going to sit there and let him write the story."

"I spent five years letting other people write my story," Naomi said. "I'm done doing that too."

She hung up, and stood alone at the edge of the tree line for a while, the noise of the camp settling behind her, the cold mountain air steadying rather than shaking her now. When she finally turned back toward the lights, she found Henrik standing a short distance away on the path, clearly having come looking for her, clearly having heard enough of the last part of the call to understand something had shifted.

He fell into step beside her without a word, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers, his jaw set in the particular careful stillness of a man deciding not to ask a question yet. She could feel it sitting in him the whole walk back — not silence because he didn't care, but silence because he was choosing his moment. She was almost certain it wouldn't last past morning.