Episode 5: The Secret Iris Can't Fight Her Way Out Of
I found out about the USB by accident, which is exactly the kind of detail that makes me think, in hindsight, that Iris never intended for me to find out about it at all.
It happened on a Thursday, four days after the amusement park, four days of a strange, careful peace between us that felt less like the aftermath of an argument and more like two people quietly rebuilding a bridge they'd both stepped too hard on. I'd walked to the garage after my shift at the convenience store — Iris had texted an address instead of her usual one-word summons, which should have tipped me off that something had shifted — and found her sitting cross-legged on the floor of Mara's auto shop, laptop balanced on an overturned tire, a small silver USB drive plugged into the side.
She closed the laptop the second she heard the door.
"What was that," I said, not quite a question.
"Nothing."
"Iris."
"It's nothing you need right now." She said it fast, flat, the exact tone she used whenever something mattered enormously and she wanted it to sound like it didn't. "I found it. I'm still figuring out what's on it. I'll tell you when I know something worth telling."
I felt the old, familiar spike of frustration rising in my chest — the same one from the mirror maze, the same one that made me want to grab the laptop and demand full transparency on principle — and I made myself sit with it for a second instead of speaking. I thought about what she'd said on the carousel. I didn't want you to look at me the way you're looking at me right now.
"Okay," I said instead, which surprised both of us.
Iris blinked. "Okay?"
"I'm not going to pretend I'm not curious. Or that I don't want you to just tell me everything right now, because that's — that is exactly what I want. But you found something that could bring June back into all this, and it's your family's mess before it's mine, and I don't get to demand you hand it over just because I'm impatient."
She studied me for a long moment, like she was checking my words for a hidden catch the way she'd checked that fire escape's structural integrity in the storage room three weeks ago. Whatever she found, or didn't find, made something in her shoulders loosen slightly.
"You're allowed to be here while I figure it out," she said, finally. "You don't have to leave just because I'm not handing you the whole thing tonight."
"I wasn't planning on going anywhere."
She looked away fast, reaching for a rag to wipe grease off her hands that were, I noticed, not actually that greasy, and said, in a voice pitched carefully casual, "Good. Because Mara's making dinner, and if you leave now she'll take it personally, and you do not want Mara Vale taking something personally."
Dinner at the Vale garage-slash-house turned out to be less a formal invitation and more an ambush disguised as hospitality. I was handed an oil filter before I'd even taken my coat off, informed by Mara — a woman with Iris's exact flat delivery but a decade more practice wielding it — that dinner wasn't ready until the used oil got properly disposed of, and that in her house, everyone contributed or nobody ate.
"She does this to everyone," Iris said, not quite apologizing, handing me a pair of gloves two sizes too big. "Consider it a tax."
I learned, over the next forty-five minutes, how to change oil under Mara's brisk, occasionally profane instruction, sorted a drawer of loose screws by size while Iris narrated increasingly implausible stories about which customers had brought in which disasters, and survived a dinner during which Pickle attempted, on four separate occasions, to steal food directly off my plate with a boldness that suggested he considered it less theft and more a toll.
"He respects you," Mara observed, watching Pickle fail a fifth time and settle for sulking on the windowsill instead. "He doesn't usually bother stealing from people he doesn't like. Efficient use of effort."
"I'm flattered, I think."
"You should be. That bird has better judgment about people than most adults I know." Mara refilled my glass without asking, in the specific way of someone who'd decided, unilaterally, that I was staying for a while whether I'd planned to or not. "Iris ever tell you about the night she sat outside County General for eleven hours?"
"Mara." Iris's voice had gone tight in a way I hadn't heard since the amusement park.
"He's going to hear about it eventually, might as well be from someone who isn't going to make it sound smaller than it was." Mara turned back to me, unbothered by her niece's glare. "June got hurt pretty bad, senior year, right around the time everything with the school blew up. Car accident, nothing to do with any of this, just bad luck on a wet road. Iris was fifteen. She sat in that waiting room from six in the evening until five in the morning, wouldn't eat, wouldn't call me until it was already over, because she'd decided somewhere in there that if she left for even a minute, June would slip away while she wasn't looking."
"I was just passing the time," Iris said, to her plate, in a voice that fooled absolutely no one at the table.
"She was fifteen and she sat on a hospital floor for eleven hours because she loved someone and didn't know how to say that out loud, so she just refused to leave instead," Mara said, gently, in the tone of someone correcting a fact rather than an opinion. "That's the whole story of this kid, if you want to understand her. She doesn't say the feeling. She just does the thing the feeling would have made her do anyway."
I looked across the table at Iris, who had gone very still, jaw tight, staring hard at a spot on the tablecloth like it required her full concentration. I thought about the fire hydrant cake. I thought about the earbuds in the old wing, the rain sounds handed over without a word of explanation. I thought about a girl who'd apparently spent three years being told her actions were threats, learning slowly and badly that the only love language available to her was the one that looked, from the outside, like force.
"I get it now," I said, quietly, mostly to her. "I think I finally get it now."
Iris didn't answer. But under the table, where Mara couldn't see, her hand found mine, and stayed there for the rest of the meal.
After dinner, once Mara had shooed us both out to "go do your homework or whatever it is you're actually doing" with a knowing look that suggested she was under no illusions about what we were actually doing, Iris led me back to the garage's small office, closed the door, and finally opened the laptop again without me having to ask.
"I want to show you something," she said. "Before I lose my nerve about it."
The video that loaded was older than the one from the school's records room — June looked younger here, hair shorter, sitting in what looked like her own bedroom rather than a hidden office, recording herself on what was probably an old laptop camera late at night, the kind of low-quality footage people only make when they're not thinking about anyone else ever watching it.
"—okay, if this ever gets found, I need to be specific," June's recorded voice said, quieter and less controlled than the version from the old wing. "Nolan's not smart enough to run this whole thing alone. He's good at spending money and bad at covering tracks, which means someone's been covering them for him. There's someone with real access — not student council access, staff access — who's been quietly steering every internal complaint into a dead end before it gets anywhere near the administration. I don't have a name yet. I just know it's someone people trust. Someone with a badge that opens doors mine never could."
The recording ended there, cutting to black with the abruptness of someone closing a laptop lid mid-thought rather than a proper edit.
"Someone with staff access," I repeated. "Not a student. A teacher. Or—"
"Or a school employee with administrative clearance," Iris finished. "Which is a much shorter list than 'everyone at Northbridge who dislikes me,' if you think about it."
"You've had this the whole time and didn't tell me."
"I've had it for six days," Iris said, and there was no defensiveness in it now, just plain fact laid out flat on the table between us. "I watched it eleven times trying to figure out if telling you would put you in more danger, and I couldn't decide, so I kept not deciding, which I realize isn't actually a decision at all. I'm sorry. I should have told you the second I found it."
"Yeah," I said. "You should have."
We sat with that for a second — not an argument, just an honest accounting of a debt, the kind you can only really pay by acknowledging it plainly instead of arguing your way around it.
"I'm telling you now," Iris said. "For what it's worth."
"It's worth a lot, actually." I reached for her hand again, and this time she let me hold it without immediately turning it into a joke about structural handholding protocols. "I need you to understand something. I'm not scared of what you're capable of, Iris. I never was, not really. I'm scared of finding out things after they've already put you in danger, because by then I can't do anything except be angry about it, and I'd rather be scared with you in real time than angry after the fact."
Something in her face went soft in a way I hadn't seen it go soft before — not the flat competence, not the careful deflection, just a plain, unguarded look that made my chest ache in a way I wasn't entirely prepared for.
"Okay," she said. "Real time. I can try that."
My phone buzzed at 10:47 that night, long after I'd walked home under a sky gone properly dark, the kind of late text that immediately makes your stomach drop before you've even read it. It was from the school's general announcements account — the same one that sent out weather delays and lunch menu changes — except this email had an attachment, and the subject line read, simply: Thought you should see this, Evan.
No sender name. No explanation. Just a screenshot, attached, of what appeared to be a private message thread between two accounts I didn't recognize, timestamps from three weeks earlier — right around the time the truss came down.
Iris: he's going to find out eventually. about all of it. June, the money, everything.
Unknown contact: and when he does?
Iris: he leaves. if he knows the whole thing he leaves, so I need him to only know as much as keeps him close enough to help without knowing enough to run.
I read it four times. I read it a fifth time, slower, looking for a detail that would make it not mean what it very clearly said it meant, and I didn't find one.
My hands were not steady when I set the phone down on my desk. I thought about the earbuds. I thought about the fire hydrant cake, the eleven hours in a hospital waiting room, the way she'd said real time, I can try that not four hours earlier with an expression I would have sworn, would still swear, was completely genuine.
I thought about the fact that someone — someone with access to a general school announcement account, which meant someone with staff-level clearance, which meant someone matching exactly the description June had given in a video I'd watched not four hours ago — had sent me this at almost eleven at night, timed precisely to land right after the best evening Iris and I had shared since this whole arrangement started.
I didn't answer it. I didn't call Iris either, not yet, though my thumb hovered over her name for a long, uncertain minute.
I just sat there in the dark of my room, staring at a screenshot that might be entirely true, or might be exactly the kind of manufactured doubt someone with staff access and a grudge against Iris Vale would know precisely how to construct — and realized, with a slow, sinking feeling, that I had absolutely no way of telling the difference between the two.
End of Episode 5.