Aaron was pulling on his jeans. ‘You know, this is all you talk about now, Vera.’
She’d paused then. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Your aunt, old people, staff-to-patient ratios. It’s starting to give me the shits, if I’m honest.’
‘My worry for my aunt, who is potentially being neglected by the people who are being paid to mind her, is giving you the shits?’
He’d shrugged.
‘And my investigation? My exposé on the aged care industry that you were all supportive and gung-ho about, is that giving you the shits too, now?’
‘Vera, honey, let’s not overreact.’
‘This is not me overreacting, Aaron. This is me getting angry. Getting upset. Getting let down.’
‘I just think we’ve all had enough of drama and bad news stories. I think theSouth Coast Morning Heraldneeds some levity at the moment.’
‘Fluff pieces.’
‘Hey, I don’t answer to you, Vera, I answer to the shareholders. If they want levity in the Sunday issue, they get levity, all right?’
‘But Aaron … I thought you were with me on this.’
The look on his face made it clear he wasn’t with her at all. A horrid thought struck her. ‘Wait a minute. Did you even print my story this week?’
He came around to her side of the bed, where she was flinging back pillows and doonas and twisted damn sheets and trying to get the hell up. ‘Vera, listen—’
She ignored him. She hauled on her jeans and t-shirt and took off for the front door of his house. There, safely wrapped in plastic against the dew of dawn, was the Sunday paper. She ripped through the layers of plastic and flicked through the pages. Sports, furniture advertisements, the national stories they printed on syndication from the big city papers … but on her page, where the article she’d laboured over for days should have been, was an advertisement.
For Acacia View Aged Care.
Where care and respect,she read wrathfully through the tears in her eyes,comes first.
She could feel him standing behind her on his front step, and she looked up. ‘What the actual heck, Aaron?’
‘I had to make a choice, Vera. The newspaper needs the advertising revenue, and when Chris Sykes contacted me—’
‘You’ve been cosying up with the general manager of Acacia View and you didn’t even tell me?’
‘I haven’t been cosying, as you put it. I’ve been running a newspaper. Which means earning money through advertisements so we can pay your wages, and not pissing off the businesses in town who are keen to advertise with us.’
‘So you threw my article under the bus for financial gain, is that it?’
‘It was a good business decision.’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘Wait … how did Chris even know I was running a second article? The one that should be in this newspaper, today, where I discussed my aunt’s care at Acacia View?’
Aaron raised his hands as though he was placating a wild beast. ‘Come on back inside, Vera. We need to talk about this.’
‘Correction. I need to talk about this. I need to talk to whichever newspaper in this country still gives a damn about reporting facts fearlessly. Which was it, Aaron? Did you squeeze an advert out of them in return for not running my article? Or did they squeeze you? I bet that was it, wasn’t it? Where’s your damn spine?’
‘Are you threatening me, Vera?’
‘I’m promising you, Aaron, the way I promised my aunt I would campaign for change. And unlike you, I keep my word.’
Of course that was when he sacked her. She’d been barefoot on the front step of his house and he’d pulled her job out from under her feet.
The prosecution charge came later, after Aaron ratted her out to his new best buddy Chris Sykes by telling him she’d hidden a camera in her aunt’s room at Acacia View.