Chapter 14 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Catherine Whitmore was done with plans by noon.

She was seated in the drawing room, holding her phone in one hand, a folded list of names in the other, women like Catherine knew that reputation was a currency more valuable than anything that had been carried from her basement that morning, and whose husbands sat on the same charity boards as Victor.

She was shivering, so her hand shook while she was dialing the first number, but she held her lips tightly together so her hand stopped shaking.

Despite the vans still loading boxes on her driveway, despite the agents still moving through her house, despite all the boxes being loaded into vans, Catherine said, "Margaret. I want you to hear it first before they twist it.”

As two o'clock approached, the first statements were posted online.

A close relative of the Whitmore family told the Daily Mail that the accusations were the rattling of a bitter former son-in-law who has been made to feel financially dependent on people who they have tried to help all along and was recently asked to leave the family home.

By four, three additional society women had given variations on the same theme, bitter, desperate, fabrication, financial dependency, each repeating Catherine's careful phrasings with practiced confidence as though they had coined the words themselves.

Theo saw it all on David's laptop, and his jaw clenched as he read the latest headlines.

David scrolled his feed, his eyes narrowing with each repetition of the same four words in various feeds: “They're fast.”

“They had thirty years of experience.” Theo said. He sat against the couch's cushions with his arms tightly over his chest and watched his name being paired with the terms bitter and desperate be seen on screens he never saw.

“This one's getting traction real quick,” David mumbled, rotating the laptop a little bit so Theo could see the share count rising in real-time.

Theo said nothing. His hands twisted where they lay on his forearms, knuckles white.

However, by six o'clock, the story turned.

The reporter was a younger one, a local journalist whom Theo knew instantly, who had been covering local corruption for a couple of years, and wrote something entirely different. The headline was: The Whitmore Allegations: A Look at Theo Callahan's Journalism Career, preceding the allegations.

The article laid out, step by step and carefully, Theo's record. The Hartford bribery scandal which had ended his career three years ago. A series of articles on construction fraud that were posted two years ago. The pattern has been there for almost ten years, and a journalist who specialized in uncovering just the sort of corruption that is being charged against the Whitmore family.

“Is this anyone you know, did you recognize him?” David asked. Turning the laptop screen completely towards Theo

Theo bent his head forward to read the byline twice, his eyebrows rising slightly. He took a breath of surprise and it came out faint. “Tommy Reyes, he was an intern when I was at the paper, just out of college at the time. I taught him how to do it himself with his first FOIA request.”

“He remembered you,” David said, his smile increasing one corner of his mouth as he saw Theo's face begin to move into a slight expression.

By eight, the story had split cleanly in two. Half the coverage was disguised as an attack on a good family, a man seeking revenge, a family feud, a marriage gone sour. The other half was straight to Theo's record, and pointedly asked, why a journalist, whose decade-long proven track record of accuracy would suddenly make up something so elaborate, so well documented, so dangerous to himself personally?

The comment sections quickly became overrun with both sides of the argument. Hashtags started to emerge within the hour, vying with one another for attention. A photo of Theo from a few years ago set at an awards ceremony, in a borrowed jacket and rented suit, smiling awkwardly at the camera, made the rounds and a new not so flattering photo was sent out of the mansion this morning of him, with his lip split, suit ripped open, eyes wide with adrenaline and exhaustion.

The two pictures side by side in front of him, Theo said quietly, "This is what they do.” His fingers ached as he slowly gripped the edge of the laptop. “They don't have to find out that anything is false, only that it's doubtful enough for others to believe it. Doubt is enough for them.”

David sat back in his chair, slowly rubbing his jaw, watching carefully his brother's face. "So what do we do? Do we react to any of it?”

Theo's eyes remained glued to the screen, and his voice was flat and even, "Nothing, We leave Sarah to do her job. The evidence doesn't care what people think online and none of this changes what's in those boxes.”

As he spoke, however, Theo could sense the familiar constriction of his chest, the prick of eyes, the judgment, the weighing of thousands of people who had never met him, who never would meet him. He knew that someone did something like that to him three years ago, and it was someone from Hartford that did it, and the world had been happy to embrace one version over the other.

He slowly shut the laptop and the screen's light was extinguished from his face.

“Oh, it's already begun,” he whispered.

Slowly and carefully, David spoke. “For what it is worth, Reyes's piece is now being read by two national outlets and it's not staying small.”

Theo lifted up his gaze slowly. "How big?"

“It’s big enough that this won't just be a local story tomorrow,” David said. “Which translates to more eyes, more scruffiness on both sides.”

Theo absorbed that, his jaw working slightly. More eyes meant more people looking for cracks in the evidence, in his story, in him. He thought of Catherine's calm, practiced voice on those calls, and wondered how many more she had left to make before the day was out.

"Then we make sure there are no cracks to find," Theo said finally.

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