Chapter 12
I’m wearing real pants and pouring the remains of our French press into a travel mug because Ian says this is what I need.
He rolled over in bed this morning, after the alarm went off, and declared in his most concerned tone: “I think it would be really good for you to go in today. You know, see other people, socialize a little?”
He said it like a question, but it wasn’t one.
I’d already been awake for hours, the fury cresting and crashing inside my chest like a boiling wave, while Ian snored softly beside me—the unbothered slumber of a man whose wife carries his stress for him.
I thought of how satisfying it would be to throw the lamp on my nightstand against the wall on his side of the bed.
The collision, and maybe the sting of a few shards, tearing him from the quiet.
But I need Ian to believe that I have truly moved on. So, when the alarm sounded and he looked at me like I was more breakable than that bedside lamp, all I said back was “You’re right. I’ll go in.”
He’s working from home today, so I can’t fake it.
I have to pack up my laptop and kiss him goodbye.
Now I head out the door like a white-collar nomad, wandering the city, on the hunt for a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi where I won’t run into anyone from my office or, worse, Ian on a break from the apartment.
I walk all the way to Dupont Circle—that’s almost a mile and a half, and in ankle boots, not sneakers—and take the Red Line north to Woodley Park.
Late in the morning on a Tuesday, the Starbucks across from the zoo is sparsely populated by a couple of tourists waiting for their drinks, and a woman who looks barely out of college trying to sweet-talk a toddler into eating grapes from a plastic cup. The nanny.
I order a cappuccino and install myself in a quiet back corner, next to an outlet.
I refreshed my work email every ninety seconds the whole ride here, but it’s still the first thing I check once my computer is plugged in and open.
I drum my fingers on the table while the Wi-Fi connects.
Six new messages appear, one after the other.
Most are from clients—they’ll get my vague out-of-office reply: I’m away at the moment, but looking forward to connecting upon my return!
None of the emails are from Jordana.
A knot tightens in my stomach. I can’t take much more of the not knowing. All the blackmail material in the world won’t do me any good if I don’t have the salary to pay for the house.
But at least this gives me more time to dig. I open my bookmarks bar and click on the page for Falling Apart. I stare at the one-star review from Ellipsis, my nickname for the mystery author.
DO NOT TRUST CURTIS brADSHAW.
Simultaneously, the most exhilarating and frustrating five words I have ever read.
One rabbit hole I didn’t have time to dive down yesterday was the press around the book. Maybe the clue I need is hidden in plain sight—in some interview that Curt gave somewhere—not buried in decades of old court records. Maybe I’ve been overthinking things.
I do a simple news search for Curt’s name and the title of the book. The Squawk Box interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin comes back as a top result. I put in my earbuds and listen to it again, but nothing stands out. It just sounds like a lot of bloviating.
Curt also did a TV interview with Fox Business.
But it’s more of the same—almost verbatim.
When the Fox interviewer asks how he got the idea for the book, he gives nearly the same aw-shucks humblebrag response that he gave on Squawk Box: “Frankly, somebody should have beaten me to the punch writing it. All I did was explore a question that every single one of us has probably considered…”
Bloomberg and Business Insider both ran short pieces, too, though neither outlet seems to have interviewed him.
Both articles include the same pair of canned quotes, which I can only assume were written by somebody like me for the press release announcing the book, and not ever really spoken by Curt himself.
A story from The Washington Post, dated January 26, 2019, appears lower down in the results. Since Curt is local, maybe someone there actually bothered to pick up the phone and talk to him. When I click on it, the byline explodes off the screen: Erika Ortiz.
I skim quickly to make sure there are real quotes, and of course there are.
Erika would never turn in some boilerplate bullshit.
Then I start from the beginning and read the whole thing.
It doesn’t take long, since the article can’t be more than six hundred or seven hundred words.
And, honestly, it’s a snooze. Erika must’ve been desperate for copy that week.
I pick up my phone and search for the same story. I include the link with my text: Hey, do you remember anything about this guy?
Erika’s response comes back right away: Not really. He was a little arrogant but that’s about it. Why?
I have my cover story ready to go: He’s an investor in a restaurant that we might sign. Just doing some due diligence.
Gotcha. Which restaurant?
Doesn’t have a name yet.
I only talked to him on the phone/pretty sure he’s gay so he didn’t #MeToo me or anything if that’s what you’re asking.
LOL thanks.
Damn. I scroll back through Erika’s story one more time, trying to unearth some deeper meaning.
Another order of business occurs to me: While I have you, would you mind connecting me with your real estate agent? Please don’t mention to Heath, tho. Still trying to convince Ian it’s time to dump ours.
Ofc! I’ll shoot you both an email in just a min.
I remember my auto-reply: Thanks! Use my gmail.
A chime through my earbuds—I never took them out—pulls my attention back to my laptop.
A new work email. From Jordana. Subject line: Let’s chat.
Margo,
Call me tomorrow at 11a.
Thanks,
J.
It’s not much, but it’s typical of Jordana to keep it brief. And if the news was bad, surely I would’ve heard from HR instead. This feels like progress.
Great! I write back.
I look up from my screen just in time to see a mom battling to get through the door. She pushes a double-decker UPPababy stroller with one hand and drags a little boy—maybe three years old—behind her with the other. He clutches a stuffed tiger.
The customer by the entrance is too engrossed in his phone to notice, so I rush over to help.
“Thank you,” she says, her face a mixture of exhaustion and gratitude.
“It’s been a morning—I didn’t think it was possible to feel resentful toward pandas.
” She laughs at her own joke, and I almost miss the cue to join in because I’m transfixed by the baby sleeping in the stroller’s upper tier.
Her cheeks are smooth and plump like mochi.
She has a full head of fluffy brown hair.
I wish I could bury my nose in it and inhale.
“She’s really perfect,” I tell her mom.
The woman laughs again—“At least when she’s napping”—then she hustles up to the register, oblivious to the fact that she has everything. A dull throbbing begins to pulse behind my eyes.
No house, no baby.
No house, no life.
This is no time to second-guess myself. Back at my corner table, I pop two Advil and do the thing that I hesitated to do yesterday: Pull up the number for Curt’s dad’s hedge fund.
Curtis Bradshaw, Sr. must be pushing eighty, but he’s still listed there as chairman. I wait for the boy with the tiger to stop whining at his mom for a cake pop, then put my earbuds back in and dial star-67 to block my number from showing up on the other end of the call. A receptionist answers.
“Bradshaw Capital Management, how may I assist you?”
She sounds young. I hope Curt’s dad hasn’t tried anything with her.
“Yes, hello, is Mr. Bradshaw available?”
“He is in today, yes…” I hear the clacking of her keyboard. “I don’t see that he’s expecting a call right now, though. Does he know what this is about?”
“No, he doesn’t. My name is Lisa Waters.
I’m a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
” Lisa Waters is a real byline there, just in case anyone bothers to Google me.
“I wondered if he’d be willing to give an interview for a short profile I’m writing about his son, Curtis.
You might’ve heard he was recently appointed to a senior faculty position at King’s College in London, and I’m doing a series on American professors who go abroad. ”
“Oh! No, I just started, so I don’t know anything about that. Sounds awesome, though. Let me just put you on a quick hold.”
I endure almost a minute of smooth jazz before I hear the click that announces her return.
“Um, Lisa?”
“Yes, I’m still here,” I say.
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Bradshaw says he’s not interested in speaking with you.”
The energy has drained from her voice.
“Really?” I assumed he’d be happy to brag about his kid for a puff piece—and in the process, maybe drop a lead or two about where I should snoop for dirt next. “I could call back at a more convenient time. It’s a very positive story, I’m just hoping to gather some color.”
“Yeah, I explained it to him, but he said if it’s about his son, he’s not interested.” She pauses. “Please don’t write that part, though.”
“Okay, sure, but did he say anything—”
She cuts me off before I can finish. “I’m sorry, I really have to go,” she says. “But good luck!”
She hangs up.
Have Curt and his dad had some sort of falling-out then?
Apple’s ringtone fills my ears, followed by Siri’s sedate voice: “Call from Erika Oritz. Answer it?”
“Uh, yes.” The line connects. “Hey, Erika.”
“Hey, sorry to call, but this would be hard to explain over text.”
“No problem. What’s up?’
“So, I ran that guy’s name through my inbox for you, you know, just to see what came back, and an old reader email popped up.”
“Okay…” I straighten in my chair.
“All it says is ‘Do not trust Curtis Bradshaw. He is a liar’—that’s it—and it came from an anonymous address. It looks like I did try to respond to it, but I got a bounce-back that the account had already been deactivated.”
“Oh, um, wow.” I feel light-headed. “And you forgot about this?”
She laughs. “It’s not like I have any shortage of wack jobs emailing me on the regular. And who remembers anything that happened before the pandemic?”
“Yeah, true.” I push out a laugh.
“I have to run,” Erika says, “but I can forward it to you if you want.”
“That would be great.” My heart is racing. “Oh, personal Gmail again, please. Our office email has been down all morning.”
“Cool. Talk to you later,” Erika says, then hangs up.
I open my Gmail and find two unread messages from her—the introduction to her agent, and the forwarded email that could hold the break I need.
The sender’s address is nobody.noone97@. It’s dated January 27, 2019—the day after Erika’s story ran. And the note is just as Erika said: DO NOT TRUST CURTIS brADSHAW. HE IS A LIAR. All caps, like the review, and even more aggressive.
I copy and paste the email address into a new message, subject line: Curtis Bradshaw.
Hi there. I think we can help each other. Curtis Bradshaw hurt me, too. Please call me or let me know how to reach you.
I add my cell number and press send.
“Please, please, please,” I whisper to myself. I hold my breath and refresh the page.
An automatic bounce-back, identical to the one Erika got, populates at the top of my inbox, letting me know the account no longer exists.
But there is at least one more thing I can try.
I text Erika again: Hey, thanks so much for that email. Any chance your IT dept can trace the IP address?
Some IP addresses are impossible to track, but I know for a fact that the Post’s IT desk can at least attempt this.
I had them do it for me once, not long after I’d been promoted to reporter.
There’d been a kidnapping in northern Virginia that was all over the news, and I’d gotten a tip from someone claiming they’d seen the little boy that very morning, playing in a front yard in rural North Carolina.
It could’ve been the story of a lifetime.
But the IP address showed the email was a hoax—it had come from Honolulu.
Erika’s response lights up my phone: I guess … this is really only about a restaurant?
Yes, long story. You would be doing me a huge favor. I’ll owe you big time.
The three dots materialize, fade away, then appear again. She can’t figure out what to type.
Finally, she sends: Don’t worry about it. I’ll let you know what they say.
I reply: THANK YOU!