Page 17 of Seal My Fate

“It’s OK,” I reassure her. Christ, she must have been over the moon to see Wren again. Even now in the midst of all this drama, I can tell, she can’t help but look at her sister and smile. To have Wren back, after thinking she was gone forever…

I couldn’t be angry, not when this means so much to Tessa.

“I didn’t even know what was going on until we met again, and she explained everything,” she adds.

I snap back to reality at her words.Everythingbeing the massive fraud being perpetrated by my family’s company… And the fact they may have kidnapped and assaulted Wren to scare her from revealing the truth.

“Faked… How?” I demand, not wanting to believe it. Our Alzheimer’s drug, the future of the entire company, all nothing but a sham?

Wren sighs. She’s still looking at me with suspicion, and clearly doesn’t trust me, but Tessa nods, urging her on. “Explain it—to me, too. In plain English,” she adds. “Not your science talk.”

“The drug we were developing was designed to stop certain plaques forming on the brain. They were testing on mice, it’s the stage before human trials,” Wren tells us. “When I came in, they’d already finished that phase and the results were so good, they were fast-tracking the human trials.”

I nod slowly. I skimmed the info packets a few weeks ago.

“But… I was running some modelling on the test results when I found anomalies,” Wren continues. “The data set I was using didn’t match the official results. The clinical markers were way underperforming, compared with the published results.”

“The drugs didn’t work?” Tessa translates.

Her sister nods. “Not the way they needed to, to continue the research. And definitely not enough to move to human trials. I thought maybe the data set was corrupted somehow, or they were outdated results, so I flagged it for my boss at the lab. And then everything happened…” she says, her face turning shadowed. “And I knew that it wasn’t a mistake. They faked the results and moved ahead with the human trials, and they needed me to keep quiet.”

I get up, and start to pace, trying to make sense of it.Christ, this is a nightmare. All the hopeful patients and families that have been holding out for a miracle, waiting for Ashford to publish the new trial results…

I pause, struck with a sudden hope. “Even if what you’re saying is true, and the animal tests were all faked, how do we know the human trials didn’t work?” I ask, seizing on the gap in her story. “Those results could be genuine!”

Wren shakes her head. “If that drug protocol didn’t work in mice, itcan’thave worked in humans! The results showed no improvement in the plaque development, no improvements in cognition. There’s just no chance. The science doesn’t work that way.”

“And why would they come after her?” Tessa asks me quietly, her eyes wide. “Why would they threaten her, halfway across the world? Nobody cares what happened to a bunch of lab mice a year ago. Not unless…”

She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to.

Not unless the fraud has continued. Not unless the next set of drug trials were altered, too.

Not unless Ashford’s entire future is being built on a lie.

“What I don’t understand, is how they think they can get away with this.” Tessa frowns. “Surely once the drug is released, people will realize it doesn’t work?”

Wren shakes her head. “Even if a medication only shows, say, a 10% improvement in some patients, sometimes that’s enough to justify making it available to everyone. And for a disease like Alzheimer’s, that has no other proven treatment, people will leap on that chance, however small…”

“It’s why Ashford has sunk so much into the research,” I agree, numb. “Whoever finds something that works—even just a little—they’ll own the entire market. Zero competition. And a degenerative disease like this, it’s hard to track someone’s progress. They could just claim a patient would have declined even faster without the drug.”

“Which is why the controlled trials are so important,” Wren says tightly. “That data is the only real proof anyone will have that the drug works.”

The scale of the lies is unbelievable. Rolling out a drug they know is useless to millions of people around the world…

“Something like this… The faked results. The cover-up. Who at Ashford would have known?” I ask, already sick to my stomach.

“It wouldn’t need to be many,” Wren shakes her head. “The edits could have been slipped in as soon as the results came in. They just forgot to scrub the original file from the data server. And my colleagues, they never would have stood for it,” she adds fiercely. “You don’t fake the data. It’s a cardinal sin of science.”

“Your boss, that you reported it to,” Tessa asks. “Could he have made the changes?”

“She.” Wren corrects her, and nods. “The project was her baby, Valerie had eyes on everything. Dr. DeJonge,” she explains.

Tessa and I exchange a look.

“What?” Wren asks.

“Dr. DeJonge died, a couple of weeks ago. A car wreck,” I answer slowly, my very bad feeling getting even worse.

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