Chapter 7: The Doctor and the Deal
Dr.
Renata Voss arrived at the house at 6 p.m.
She came because Gabriel had called her and said only that there was a matter requiring her immediate professional attention.
He had used a tone that left no real room for refusal.
She was sixty-one, small, with the composed bearing of a woman who had spent decades in rooms where people were frightened and had learned to appear unaffected by it.
She set her bag on the chair in the front reception room and looked at Adrian without flinching.
"Mr.
Moretti."
"Dr.
Voss."
"Your associate was not specific about the nature of this meeting."
"No.
He wasn't."
Adrian set a folder on the table between them.
He opened it to the lab report.
She looked at it.
Her composure held for approximately four seconds.
"Where did you obtain this."
"From a cup on my desk.
The cup my brother brought me last night."
Her eyes moved across the page.
He watched her read it — watched the small, precise recalibration happening behind her face as she understood what she was looking at and what it meant for her.
"I was told," she said carefully, "that the subject had provided informed consent for a long-term cognitive study.
I was told it was a voluntary protocol."
"And you believed that."
"I had documentation."
"Forged."
A pause.
"I didn't know that at the time."
"Dr.
Voss.
I'm not interested in what you knew at the time.
I'm interested in what you're going to do now."
She closed the folder.
Her hands were steady.
Whatever she was feeling, she had decided not to show it, and Adrian found himself respecting that even as he noted it.
"What are you asking me to do?"
"I'm asking you to provide a full written account of every consultation, every compound, every dosage, and every communication you had with my brother.
Dates, amounts, delivery method, stated purpose.
Everything."
"And if I do that."
"Then I have no further interest in your involvement.
The account goes to my legal team.
It stays there unless it's needed."
"And if it's needed."
"Then it will be used.
But only to the extent that it's needed."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"You're not going to the police."
"Not unless I have to."
"Why not."
"Because a police investigation takes eighteen months, destroys three legitimate businesses, and ends with my brother in a courtroom where his lawyers spend six weeks arguing about compound nomenclature." Adrian leaned forward slightly.
"I'm not interested in a courtroom.
I'm interested in consequences that are real."
She was quiet.
"The child," she said.
"The stuffed animal.
I want you to know I had no part in that."
"Dominic confirmed that."
"I would not have—" She stopped.
"I want that on record."
"It will be."
She opened her bag and took out a small notebook.
Old habit — the kind of doctor who still wrote things down by hand.
"I'll need two hours," she said.
"Take three."
Gabriel brought her tea.
Real tea, from a pot he had made himself in the kitchen, and he set it beside her without comment.
She looked at the cup.
Then at Gabriel.
"Is this—"
"It's tea," he said.
"Just tea."
She almost smiled.
She wrote for two hours and forty minutes.
When she was finished, she signed each page and handed the notebook to Adrian without reading it back.
"One question," she said, standing.
"Go ahead."
"The cognitive deterioration — at the exposure level documented.
If he had continued for another six months—"
"I know."
"I'm sorry," she said.
"For my part in it.
Whatever I believed at the time."
Adrian looked at her.
"The account you've given tonight is your part in fixing it," he said.
"That's what I'll remember."
She left at 8:43 p.m.
Gabriel locked the door behind her and came back into the reception room.
"Do you believe her?" he asked.
"About the child?
Yes."
"About the rest?"
Adrian picked up the notebook.
"It doesn't matter what I believe.
It matters what's in here."
He set it in the folder with the lab report.
"Get me Ferrante's home number," he said.
"And find out who Dominic has been talking to on the board.
I want names before midnight."
Gabriel pulled out his phone.
"And Hannah?" he asked.
Adrian paused.
"Tomorrow," he said.
May you like
"I'll speak to her tomorrow."
But he said it the way a man says something he has already been thinking about for longer than he wants to admit.
