CHAPTER FIFTEEN AC: THE REPORTER’S QUESTION
A local reporter named Nina Foster called after the fire department confirmed that investigators were treating the mailbox incident as deliberate.
She asked whether I would comment on Owen’s accusation that I had staged the event to gain sympathy.
I said I had not staged the fire and had reported what I witnessed to the authorities.
She asked whether I believed Owen was responsible.
I told her the investigation should determine responsibility based on evidence.
She asked whether I was refusing to answer because I feared a lawsuit.
I said I was refusing to turn a criminal investigation into another neighborhood argument.
Nina paused and said she understood.
Then she asked about my licensing appeal.
I told her I would not discuss a patient’s private information.
She asked whether the center had offered to settle.
I said I could not discuss confidential negotiations.
She asked whether I was frustrated by the silence around the case.
I said I was frustrated that so many people had treated a short video as permission to decide what happened in a room they had never entered.
Nina asked whether she could quote that sentence.
I said she could.
The article appeared the next morning with a photograph of the burned mailbox taken after the fire was extinguished.
It reported the investigation’s status without identifying the patient or claiming the criminal case had been resolved.
Owen posted a response accusing the reporter of protecting me.
Nina did not argue with him online.
She published a correction to one minor detail about the fire engine’s arrival time and left the rest of the article unchanged.
I appreciated the correction because it showed she was willing to revise a fact without surrendering the entire report.
When Leonard read the article, he called and asked whether I had finally become famous.
I told him I would prefer to become boring again.
He said the neighborhood had never been especially good at letting people be boring.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN AD: THE OTHER FAMILY
A woman named Marisol Grant contacted Vanessa after learning that the courier company had found delayed administrative packets.
Her mother had been a patient at a different branch of the same rehabilitation center.
Marisol said the family had spent weeks waiting for an equipment approval that the center claimed had never been received.
The delayed approval had affected the delivery of a mobility aid.
She wanted to know whether the courier audit might explain the missing correspondence.
Vanessa told her that our case could not establish what happened to her mother’s documents.
She suggested Marisol contact the courier company’s designated claims office and her mother’s care coordinator.
Marisol thanked her and asked whether she could speak to me.
Vanessa checked with me before sharing a contact method.
I agreed to a short call.
Marisol said she had watched Owen’s first video and believed I was a dangerous person who had provoked a neighbor into setting a fire.
She had changed her mind after reading the article about the recovered packets.
I told her the article did not prove everything about the courier company either.
She said she understood, but she wanted to apologize for a comment she had posted about me.
I thanked her and asked how her mother was doing.
Marisol said the equipment had finally arrived, but her mother had spent six weeks using a chair that did not fit properly.
I told her to document the delay and ask her care team to review the equipment’s fit.
She said she had already arranged an appointment.
Before ending the call, she asked whether the courier investigation would become public.
I said I did not know.
She said she hoped it would, because families needed to understand why essential documents sometimes vanished between offices.
After we hung up, I realized the delayed packets might have affected people whose names would never appear in my hearing.
The thought made the case feel larger and less personal at the same time.
