Chapter 4: The Trojan Horse<\/p>\n
The execution of their plan required an opportunity. It arrived a month later when I flew to Vancouver for an environmental policy conference.<\/p>\n
I brought my junior associate, Zara, with me. Zara was brilliant. I had personally advocated for her promotion and, the previous year, quietly lent her $8,000 for her mother\u2019s dental surgery. She had paid me back every cent, leaving a handwritten note of profound gratitude in my desk drawer.<\/p>\n
On the second afternoon in Vancouver, during a walk along the seawall, I clumsily scraped the back of my right ankle against a rusted chain barrier. A shallow, stinging graze. Nothing more.<\/p>\n
In the elevator back at the hotel, Zara stared at my ankle with a strange, hyper-fixated intensity. She insisted on fetching supplies from the gift shop. When she returned, she crouched before me, meticulously examining the broken skin, asking exactly where the metal had bitten into my flesh.<\/p>\n
We flew home to Toronto on a Friday evening. My ankle was tender, but I brushed it off.<\/p>\n
Two hours after Tristan brought me home, the buzzer rang. It was Pauline.<\/p>\n
She stood in our entryway, wearing a chillingly placid smile. She claimed she\u2019d heard from Tristan about my minor injury. Reaching into her handbag, she produced a small, unmarked glass jar.<\/p>\n
\u201cA friend in my building swears by this for skin abrasions,\u201d she purred, looking directly at my bandaged heel.<\/p>\n
Tristan beamed from the kitchen doorway. \u201cSee?\u201d he said, his voice dripping with relief. \u201cShe looks after you. It\u2019s an olive branch, Reese.\u201d<\/p>\n
Exhausted from years of trench warfare, I wanted to believe it. That night, sitting on the edge of my bed, I unscrewed the lid. The ointment smelled faintly metallic, a strange, clinical odor. But I rubbed a generous layer directly into the open scrape.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t know I was massaging a biological weapon into my bloodstream.
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chapter 4: The Trojan Horse The execution of their plan required an opportunity. It arrived a month later when I flew to Vancouver for an environmental policy conference. I brought … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12782,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-family-drama-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12787,"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12775\/revisions\/12787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redditlovers.live\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}