He Bet My Life and Lost Me Instead novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Live

Marco held the phone up at the glass doors of Mercer Freight and counted down on his fingers.

"Three. Two. You're live."

I stood in the middle of the lobby with the lab report in one hand.

It was nine in the morning, and the marble floor was full of people coming in with coffee.

The security desk stood to my left, and the two guards from the Monday of the psychiatric hold were already half out of their chairs.

"Don't," Sam said, from the revolving door. He said it to them, not me.

They stopped.

"Good morning," I said, to the phone, and to forty people who had stopped walking. "My name is Nina Doyle. I've been Director of Operations here for six years."

Someone near the elevators whispered.

"Last week I was told I was imagining my asthma attacks. Today I'm going to show you what was in my inhalers."

I held up the lab report.

"Saline. Salt water. Six months of it, from a pharmacy that doesn't exist, paid for with a company card."

I held up the sticker, pressed flat in a plastic sleeve.

"This label came off a label maker in an apartment on Wells Street."

I turned the phone's second screen toward the room, and Marco's recording played through the lobby speakers he had wired to it that morning.

Dylan's voice came out calm and unhurried.

I switched what was in the canister.

A woman at the front desk put her hand over her mouth.

When it ended, I said the one thing I had come to say.

"At the retreat, twenty executives watched me on the ground. Some of you raised a beer. Some of you stepped back so you wouldn't be in the photograph."

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