“Your job,” I went on, eyes moving deliberately across the first row, “is to take information and turn it into something people will pay attention to. You shape it. You frame it. You decide what matters and what doesn’t.”
A few heads shifted.
“My job,” I added, “is to play hockey.”
A ripple of sound moved through the room—small, uncertain, not quite laughter, not quite agreement.
I let it pass.
“And her job,” I said, cutting clean through the space, “is to manage everything the rest of you create when you decide that a gossip matters more than the truth.”
That landed. I saw it in the way a couple of pens paused. The way one of the cameras dipped, then corrected.
“She didn’t create anything.” I didn’t pause for their questions. “She was assigned to a situation that already existed. She handled it. She controlled it. She did her job better than anyone else in this organization would have under the same pressure.”
Another voice cut in. “Then how do you explain the audio?”
I shifted my weight slightly, steadying myself against the edge of the podium. “You don’t.”
Confusion flickered across a the reporters’ faces. Someone opened their mouth, ready to follow—I didn’t give them time.
“You don’t explain stolen audio,” I clarified, my gaze steady now, deliberate, locking onto the reporter who’d asked the question. “You don’t justify it. You don’t build a narrative around something that was never meant to exist in the first place.”
The room shifted.
“You don’t care how it was obtained,” I added, the edge finally slipping in, unmistakable. “You don’t care that it was taken without her knowledge. Without herconsent. That it was recorded in a private conversation and released because it was convenient.”
A few cameras lowered.
“You care that it fits the story you want to sell,” I said. “That it’s easy. That it gives you someone to point at. To profit off.” My jaw tightened once. “And she’s easy to point at. She’s connected. She’s visible. That makes her useful.”
A pause. Then, quieter—more precise. “That doesn’t make her expendable.”
No one spoke.
Not immediately.
I let it sit for a second, long enough for it to settle into the edges of the room, into the places where people didn’t like to admit they’d been called out.
Then I straightened slightly, lifting my hand from the podium, letting the space reset.
“You want something real?” I asked.
The question didn’t rise. It cut.
The room stilled.
I let my gaze move once more across the faces in front of me—reporters, cameras, phones, people waiting to decide what this was going to be.
Then I stopped looking at them.
And looked at her.
Bea stood a few feet behind me now, no longer off to the side, no longer edged out of the frame. She had stepped into the space on her own—shoulders squared, chin lifted, the line of her spine steady even as everything around her threatened to tilt.
Her eyes locked on mine.
“C’est réel,” I whispered, the words meant for her and her alone as I reached for her hand.