Chapter 24: The Gate

My name was on the door in black letters.

Dr. Lenora Finley, Director, Marrow Program.

I stood in the corridor for a while and looked at it.

The last time my name had been in that building, the word fraud had stood beside it on a screen.

The lab behind the door was mine.

The mice were mine, and the benches were mine.

I put my old green notebook on the shelf where Gregory's coffee machine used to sit.

My new team stood in a row with their hands behind their backs, young and terrified.

"Good morning," I said. "Nobody here takes credit that isn't theirs. Nobody here signs another person's name."

I smiled.

"Anything else, ask me."

A young man at the end put up his hand.

"Dr. Finley, is it true the Carbone family paid for this wing?"

"The Carbone Foundation paid for the wing," I said. "I earned the lab."

They laughed, nervously, and then properly.

At five I took my coat from the hook.

I drove the long road out of the city with the window down.

It was the road I had come up on the worst morning of my life.

I had carried a steel case then, and nowhere else in the city would have me.

The brick wall came up on the left, and the iron gate.

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Called Me a Fraud, So I Walked Into the Don's House from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.