The red tally light on Camera Two blinked at me like a dare.
"Ten seconds," Noah murmured from behind the monitor, voice low and bored, as if my heart wasn’t trying to claw its way up my throat.
The studio lights baked the tiny hairs along my neck. My blazer itched. I wondered if sweat showed on cheap polyester the way it did on silk, the way it surely didn’t on the immaculate charcoal suit belonging to the man smiling from the interview chair.
Adrian Crowe didn’t look real.
He sat with one ankle resting lightly on the opposite knee, hands relaxed on the armrests as if this last-minute live segment on a dying local station was a favor, not an inconvenience. The cameras loved him. The world loved him. Philanthropist, visionary, a man who turned a tech fortune into gleaming hospitals and scholarship funds.
The monitor showed his face in close-up: sharp jaw, smooth tan, dark hair with just enough wave to look effortlessly deliberate. His eyes, a cool slate gray, flicked to me for the barest second. No smile, not really. Just a polite curve that never touched his gaze.
I swallowed.
I was an unpaid intern. I wasn’t supposed to be on camera at all.
"Three, two…" The floor director pointed at me.
My anchor—the woman whose coffee I fetched and whose scripts I formatted—had come down with food poisoning an hour ago. The four p.m. segment on "Local Billionaire Expands Charity Initiative" had been deemed too important to kill. The EP had looked around desperate, eyes landing on me.
"You," she’d said, jabbing a finger. "You know the research. You prepped the packet. Get in makeup. Don’t screw this up, Lane."
Now the music sting faded, the crowd-noise bumper dipped, and my own face filled the in-studio screen. Twenty-three, brown hair smoothed into something TV-appropriate, hazel eyes too wide.
"Good afternoon," I heard myself say, my voice oddly steady. "I’m Emma Lane, and joining us today is Adrian Crowe, founder of the Crowe Foundation. Mr. Crowe, thank you for being here."
"Please," he replied smoothly. "Call me Adrian. And thank you for having me, Emma."
My name sounded different in his mouth. Polished, like he’d turned it over and filed off the rough edges.
We went through the motions. I asked about the new pediatric wing his foundation was funding. He gave concise, camera-ready answers, perfectly sound-bitten.
"We believe every child deserves a chance," he said at one point, hitting his rehearsed cadence. "It’s about impact, not recognition."
Impact, not recognition. The chyron below his image read: LOCAL LEGEND: ADRIAN CROWE’S NEW GIVING PLEDGE.
My stomach tightened. My notes sat on the desk in front of me, black ink bleeding into yellow legal paper. I’d written the questions last night, alone at my tiny kitchen table between sorting my mom’s medications and paying bills I couldn’t afford.
In tiny handwriting, circled twice, was a line item that wasn’t on any approved script.
2019 audit irregularities – doc 14B. Ask? (Don’t be stupid, Emma.)
I’d found it at three a.m. An old PDF in a public records database, page fourteen of a filed audit for one of the Crowe Foundation’s subsidiaries. A note in the margin from an auditor questioning a flagged transfer.
"…significant diversion of funds, unexplained in attached statements."
