Chapter 0 - Forgettable
The rejection email was short enough to be cruel.
Eden stared at her laptop screen, the words blurring together like watercolor on wet paper.
After careful consideration... competitive pool... we regret to inform you...The standard speech. The one they probably copy-pasted for everyone they didn’t want.
She should have expected it. Should have prepared herself mentally. Instead, she’d spent the last three weeks rehearsing her first day at Maple Heights Magazine like she was training for the Olympics.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Maya:????? how’d it go????
Eden didn’t respond. She couldn’t—not yet. Not when her throat felt like she’d swallowed broken glass.
The office was quiet when she arrived the next morning. She’d convinced herself she needed to ask for feedback in person, that maybe the email was a mistake, that if she just showed up and looked them in the eye, they’d see potential. They’d see her.
Her editor, Derek, looked annoyed to see her.
“Eden. This isn’t really—”
“I know the email said no,” she interrupted, hating how desperate she sounded. “But I wanted to understand why. I can improve. I can—”
Derek leaned back in his chair and sighed the way people do when they’re about to say something they’ve practiced. “You’re good. Your research is solid. Your writing is clean.”
She waited for the but. She knew it was coming.
“But you’re forgettable,” he said flatly. “You report the story. You don’t become the story. You don’t make people care. You’re background noise in a crowded room, and in journalism, that kills you.”
The words hit harder than any rejection email could.
She left the building without another word, her vision blurry, her chest tight. Forgettable. That was worse than being bad. Being bad meant you could get better. Being forgettable meant you didn’t even register as a problem worth fixing.
Eden didn’t sleep that night.
Instead, she sat in her tiny studio apartment in Parkdale, nursing cold coffee and scrolling through every news database she had access to. The Maple Heights rejection had cracked something open insider her—not hope, exactly, but anger. Sharp, clean anger that felt better than despair.
That’s when she found it.
It was buried in a police database report, the kind that never made the news cycle. A shooting in Regent Park, six months old. No arrests. No suspects. No headlines. The records were sealed—not redacted, which meant someone had actively buried this.
Eden’s fingers moved faster across her keyboard.
She pulled the victim’s name first: Marcus Chen. She dug for his background, his connections, his history. Nothing stood out. He was nobody. A small-time guy with a couple of possession charges and not enough money to matter.
But someone had cared enough to resade his shooting from the public record.
Eden created a new spreadsheet. She started crossing-referencing similar cases—incidents with sealed records, suspicious closures, patterns that didn’t make sense. Hours blurred together. Her coffee went cold. Her eyes burned.
By 3 a.m., she had fifteen cases.
By 5 a.m., she had a name that appeared in four of them.
Vale Holdings.
It showed up in property records near the shooting sites. In shell company documents. In corporate filings that meant absolutely nothing on their own but looked suspicious when arranged in sequence.
Eden circled the name twice, then a third time.
Her pen pressed so hard the tip nearly tore through the paper.
That was it. This was the story that would make her more than background noise.
That was the story that would make her unforgettable.
