Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mal
Strawberry cheesecake ice cream obtained, he texted Jo. When do you want me to head over?
Jo didn’t respond. After the first three hours, he thought, Well, she was probably out late last night . After the next forty-eight, he thought, She saw Adelman in real life, fell back in love, and now wants nothing to do with me . It wasn’t until he received a text from Amelia requesting a video call that he understood that something more troublesome
was at play.
“I’ve gotten twelve requests to interview you today, and none of them are about your book,” Amelia said once they were done
with formalities. “Can you fill me in on what’s going on with you and a certain Josephine Boateng?”
Dread curdled in his stomach.
“You know Jo?” he said.
A dimple appeared in Amelia’s chin. “You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t know her right now,” she said. She
peered at him from over her teal tortoiseshell Warby Parkers. “You have no idea what I’m talking about right now, do you?”
“None,” Mal confirmed.
The chat box dinged with new messages: links to articles from Goss, Insider , Marie Claire , the New York Post . He clicked the first link. Scrolled through. Found a photograph from his event at Em-Dash staring back at him. Next to him,
a photograph of Jo from a premiere, a straight bang hanging in front of her face, looking like a color-swapped Jessica Rabbit
in a formfitting emerald sweetheart-neckline gown. And next to that, one of Ezra Adelman in a cream sweater with his sleeves
rolled up, looking very much the part of an American heartthrob. The title: Who Doesn’t Want a Billionaire?
“What is this?” Mal said out loud. He skimmed through the article as quickly as possible, picking up the pertinent claims:
People thought Ezra and Jo may have been transitioned from “just friends” to “something more”—already a travesty, because
surely she wasn’t good enough—but also that Jo was simultaneously seeing Mal, making her an ungrateful seductress too. Ezra
was positioned as a hapless rising star, the nepotism baby who was talented in his own right, who’d elevated her at every
step.
And Mal? He was a sexy lamp. A talented one, but collateral damage all the same.
When he turned back to Amelia, she looked contrite.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think about how this might hurt you—”
“They’re friends,” Mal said, even though a small voice whispered in the back of his mind: I knew it. “They’ve been friends for a long time. I don’t know what angle these people are taking, but they’ve got it wrong.”
“I think they got at least a few things right,” Amelia said. She shared her screen, highlighted a paragraph: Malcolm Waters is no one to snub your nose at. A Renaissance man himself, his New York Times bestselling debut novel, She Blooms at Dusk, was recently featured on Lana Porter’s long-running talk show. Another window showed the Google search history for his name, a graph that resembled a cliff. “We got eight thousand sales
yesterday alone. I know you don’t check your Instagram, but you’re blowing up. People are very curious about what kind of
man could compete with Adelman Junior.” She smiled, as if Mal was supposed to be pleased by the positive reception. “You know
that I hate this kind of stuff as much as the next guy, but you know what they say about a little bit of controversy. It sells.”
Some part of him grasped that she thought this “little bit of controversy,” as she put it, was a boon. But overlaying it,
he could see Jo, her face wet with tears, her body curled into a fetal position in the middle of her bed.
“So,” Amelia said. “Would you be interested in doing an interview or two? I think it could be a good idea. Just turn the conversation
more to your work. We can coach you through it; knowing how and when to pivot is a skill—”
“With all due respect,” Mal interrupted, “I need a little time to process all of this.”
Amelia clamped her mouth shut.
“Of course,” she said. “Oh, and I saw that you sent me your proposal. I’ll take a look at it. We can touch base later this
week.”
Mal nodded, but he knew it was impossible to think of anything other than Jo after that. She wasn’t answering her phone, and he quickly discovered that he had no way of reaching her. He checked her Instagram, but she’d locked down her DMs and turned off her comments. Her website’s contact page had been taken down, her blog password-protected. He sent her roommate, Dahlia, a direct message on social media, but a few hours had passed without a response. The only person he could think to reach out to was Ezra himself, and Mal suspected he wouldn’t be too keen on talking to “the other man.”
What Mal did know was where Jo lived.
“You can’t just give me a name,” the young man with a patchy beard who worked the front desk of Jo’s high-rise said. He gave
Mal a look that could cut glass. “You need to give me a unit number. Otherwise, I could be letting a stalker upstairs, and
that would make me pretty bad at my job, wouldn’t it?”
Mal clutched the edge of the counter and did his best not to curse him out. He’d driven to Lincoln Park right after his call
with Amelia, in the worst of Chicago rush hour, and had spent the entire forty-minute drive convincing himself that showing
up at Jo’s place uninvited wasn’t an absolutely batshit thing to do. His already frayed nerves were now shot to shit. He didn’t
need this shrimpy little kid confirming his inner fears out loud.
“Can you at least try to call her?” Mal said, using all his remaining energy to stay cordial. “That’s what people normally
do, right?”
“We value security a little more than normal places, sir,” the doorman said, but he picked up the phone and dialed. Mal heard
it ring once, twice, three times, then go to voicemail. “Sorry. Looks like she’s not available. Maybe try to get her yourself
and I can send you up.”
Gritting his teeth, Mal pulled out his phone, scrolled to Jo’s name, hit dial. It was a fruitless exercise; he’d already called
three times today to no avail. To no one’s surprise, the call went straight to voicemail.
“Can you at least tell me if you’ve seen her?” he asked, desperate. “I just... need to know if she’s okay.”
Something in the doorman’s face shifted, a relaxation of his expression from hostility to something like pity.
“I’m going to be honest with you, man,” he said. “I haven’t seen her down here in a couple days.”
“Oh,” Mal said, even as terror gripped him. He’d only read a few of the articles, and none of them had been particularly gracious.
“Okay. Well. Um. If you do see her, can you tell her that Malcolm stopped by?”
The doorman nodded, and Mal turned to the door, accepting defeat.
“Did you say Malcolm?” a high-pitched voice said from behind him. “As in, Waters?”
Mal whipped around. He was quite sure he’d never met the small Asian woman standing in front of him, but he was equally certain
that he knew who she was. With her buzzed bleach-blond hair, vampire-black lipstick, and the ends of a fine-line tattoo roping
up her neck, Dahlia Cortes would have been hard to miss.
“Yeah,” he said cautiously. “And, let me guess... Dahlia?”
“I am she,” she said. “Do you have a minute? I think we share a common interest.”
“Absolutely,” Mal said.
Dahlia answered Mal’s next few questions without needing to hear them: Yes, Jo’s still alive; no, I don’t think she’s okay; yes, I think she needs help; no, I don’t know how exactly to help her. She’d been on her way to the grocery store but insisted that they go to a coffee shop instead, which quickly changed to talking in the apartment’s business center when Mal brought up that maybe being seen publicly with another woman might make things worse for Jo. Mal sat on one of the leather stools as Dahlia smacked a dusty old Keurig machine awake.
“Thanks for stopping by,” she said, turning around at the counter as the Keurig sputtered and spit. “Seriously. I appreciate
it. She will too, once she comes around.”
“Have you seen her?” Mal said.
“Briefly,” Dahlia said. “I picked up a couple shifts in the ICU over the weekend, but I saw her right before she left for
the benefit. I assume she spent the night before with you, after your book signing?” Mal nodded, warmth rising to his cheeks.
“I saw her for like two seconds a couple of days ago. She grabbed something out of the pantry. I knew something was up, like,
I’d seen some of the early stuff on social media, but the Post article wasn’t out yet, so I figured we’d talk about it later, but now—”
“The Post article?” Mal interrupted. “What’s special about that one?”
Dahlia’s face fell. “Oh honey,” she said, then: “Let me send you the link.”
She did, giving him permission to save her number to his phone. This one, unlike the articles before, seemed to be focused
particularly on Ezra’s mother, Renata Kovalenko, and read like the workings of a journalist who had been waiting for an opportunity
to strike rather than a bedraggled intern scraping social media for controversy.
It is 1993, and Renata Kovalenko is walking the runway for Chanel’s Spring/Summer collection. She holds her own amongst excellent company—Naomi Campbell is only a few paces behind her in an iconic pink princess/ punk set that remains in the American cultural consciousness to this day—but she isn’t yet a star. That will come later, after her seven-year-long affair with tech mogul Paul Adelman culminates in a multimillion-dollar wedding and the launch of her short-lived fashion line, Syla. At the time, however, Kovalenko is known most widely as a homewrecker. Her son, Ezra Adelman, is born in 1991, two years before Paul Adelman’s divorce from his first wife, Katherine Listroph, is finalized. Renata herself shows no shame for the circumstances of her marriage. “We fell in love,” she tells the New York Sun that same year. “What is so wrong about that?”
It’s a perspective that makes her infamous for a time, but Renata is careful to avoid negative press after that. In the fashion
world, she’s known as easygoing and fun-loving, a personality she lets shine during her four-season stint as a judge on Project Runway . Her relatable persona helps to distract from her husband’s gaffes. That is, until May of 2009, when Paul Adelman is caught
on video verbally accosting and eventually slapping one of his employees, then twenty-seven-year-old software engineer Aaron
Jackson, at the afterparty for the release of Knydus’ 2010 Odyssey Operating System.
The assault is a PR nightmare. Knydus Engineering, like many tech giants, has a diversity problem—less than 2% of its new
hires identify as Black. The slap confirms what many pundits have postulated—that Knydus Engineering does not respect Black
talent... or people. The effect is immediate and enormous: Knydus Engineering stock plummets 13% overnight.
Only six months later, nineteen-year-old Ghanaian American Elion University student Josephine Boateng enters the Adelmans’ circle. Even at her young age, she is even-tempered and polite, homely, and the first in her family to go to college. She is also, conveniently, the same complexion as Mr. Jackson.
It is not uncommon for celebrities to have less-famous friends, but less common for said friends to be folded into their brand.
We first see Josephine at the 2010 Knydus Chicago Children’s Ball on the arm of one Ezra Adelman. She appears again, just
weeks later, in photographs of the family in the Maldives, and after that quite frequently as the younger Adelman’s de facto
plus-one. In interviews, Ezra calls her his “best friend in the entire world,” Renata, “a remarkable young lady” and, on multiple
occasions, refers to her as her “daughter.”
Josephine fades from view for a few years, presumably to pursue her medical training, at Chicago’s lauded James B. Herrick
School of Medicine. On her popular social media platform, collectively called Dr.Jojobee, she discusses topics that “patients
are afraid to ask.” She also often divulges information about her own path into medicine and asserts that, without her full-ride
scholarship, she would “never have been able to afford a medical education.” She encourages premedical students from low socioeconomic
backgrounds to “keep [your] head down, work hard. Go to office hours. Time for leisure will come later.”
What she fails to divulge is from whence her scholarship came.
In 2012, the year before Josephine’s matriculation to medical school, En Garde makes an uncharacteristically large donation to the order of $4 million to James B. Herrick School of Medicine.
“Our scholarship programs are by and large funded by the generous donations of individuals who prefer to remain anonymous,”
William Laurier, the Dean of Students at Herrick School of Medicine, states. “It’s not atypical for them to specify a group
of students they would like to support. However, donations cannot be directed toward particular students. To maintain the
integrity of our selection process, they also in no way affect our admissions decisions.”
It’s an assertion that would be more plausible if the Adelman family had a habit of supporting higher education. As it stands,
the donation to Herrick remains the only significant contribution that Nest, Knydus’ charity branch, has made to an undergraduate
or graduate institution. Herrick School of Medicine has a 3.9% acceptance rate, one of the lowest in the country. Josephine
Boateng is admitted with a 3.7GPA, significantly lower than the class average.
The Adelman family immediately sees a return on their investment. In 2012, Josephine Boateng posts to her popular Instagram
a video of Renata Kovalenko helping take down her braids. It goes viral, with viewers commenting on both Renata’s deftness
and her cultural competence. She is, per several commenters, “invited to the cookout,” a term meant to imply inclusion into
the Black community.
Within three years, Knydus Engineering successfully rebrands itself as a great valuer of diversity. Forbes magazine recognizes the company as one of the “Ten Best Places for Black Programmers to Work.” Knydus Engineering hires Amancia
Patterson, a Jamaican American wunderkind whose résumé includes executive positions at Dell and Hulu, as chief operating officer;
she appears on the Lana Porter Show months later to talk about her experience as the “only Black woman at the table.” Aaron Jackson settles with Paul Adelman
to the tune of $700,000, and his public assault is forgotten.
Which begs the question: By associating their family with a poor young Black woman, did Renata Kovalenko pull off the most
successful PR move in recent history? Did Josephine Boateng reject America’s Most Eligible Bachelor, or did she simply renege
on a decade-long agreement to be the Black Best Friend to a family that gave her the financial backings to pursue her dreams?
At the end of the article was a photograph: a young, round-faced Jo standing between Renata and Ezra, Ezra’s arm around her
waist, Renata’s over her shoulders. Mal stared at it for a long time before recognizing it as the picture Renata had framed
on her desk. He felt like someone had knocked the breath out of him. The article had managed to do worse than all the previous
ones had; stripped Jo of her agency, denied her efforts, presented her as someone willing to sell her likeness to a corporate
devil. In it, she wasn’t so much a duplicitous succubus as she was a creature of ambition.
“Wow. You really do care about her,” Dahlia observed when he looked up from his screen. She leaned back against the coffee counter with folded arms, looking down at him from under thick falsies. “I’ll be honest, when she told me you confessed your love after the first hit, I was worried you might just be messing with her. But you seem pretty sincere.”
Mal couldn’t muster the energy to be embarrassed.
“Of course,” Mal said. He dropped his head into his hands. “What about you? You’re her roommate. I’ve had a few of those in
my day, and I don’t think any one of them would drop everything to plan an intervention for me.”
Dahlia quirked an eyebrow, then knocked back her coffee like a shot and pulled out the stool across from him.
“Touché,” she said. “Honestly, I probably like her more than she likes me.” She sighed, dropping heavily onto the stool. “We
met online, you know. I was in the middle of a nasty divorce. At the last minute, my ex-husband pulled money out of his ass
for a lawyer and started asking for alimony and... all of a sudden I didn’t have money for rent, let alone to move. Would
you know that that woman just sent it to me?” She laughed mirthlessly. “Didn’t even flinch. Didn’t even tell me she was going to do it. Just wired me $5K, no
questions asked, and when I tried to refuse, she told me ‘not to be dramatic.’ ‘Do you want to keep living with that piece
of shit?’ she’d said. I didn’t. It was done. A week later I was moving in with her.”
Mal snorted. He’d gathered that about Jo: that she was not always nice, but frequently kind.
“You know, I had this big group of friends back home before moving to Chicago,” Dahlia continued. “When things started going south for me, they disappeared. Not a single one of them would’ve sent me money. They couldn’t even offer me a couch to crash on when my ex started bringing his new girlfriend over. Lots of thoughts and prayers, with no substance. And here’s this girl who I haven’t even met in real life, throwing me a life raft just because.” Dahlia ground her chin into the heel of her hand. “She’s a special person, you know. Like, who does that? I paid her back, but I feel like she wouldn’t have pushed me to. It was like... she couldn’t help but help me.”
“I know,” Mal said quietly. His fingers tangled on themselves, and he remembered how, not long ago, Jo’s had curled between
his, how they’d settled into the grooves like they belonged there. How effectively she blasted away his moments of self-doubt.
“So,” Dahlia said. “What’s the game plan?”
The game plan was simple. They drew up shifts: Dahlia covered most days, Mal most evenings. She sent an email to Jo’s therapist
seeking guidance; he stopped by the grocery store to stock her empty pantry. Jo seemed to be subsisting on Ritz Crackers and
dry ramen noodle packages, and so they split meal prep too: Dahlia handling lunch, Mal dinner.
“Don’t make me regret this,” Dahlia said, dropping her spare key fob into Mal’s palm. To her credit, she’d taken a picture
of his driver’s license and his license plate as collateral— Just in case this is an elaborate attempt at burglary.
One thing they didn’t agree on was the talking thing. Dahlia might have found it weird, how Mal puttered around her apartment
and made himself at home while she was gone, his conversations with Jo that were really with thin air. He liked to imagine
that Jo was listening, that the shift of movement he heard through her door was her turning over with amusement.
“I’m making the tortellini I told you about,” he announced to no one as he mixed together the cheese filling. “Brought over my stand mixer and everything. I know you don’t cook, but you should get one.”
Then, as he passed dough through the pasta attachment: “My dad used to color it with natural ingredients, back in the day.
The blue tortellini was my favorite. He used purple cabbage for that, added baking soda to it. I used to think it was magic.
I thought about making it today, but I figured I shouldn’t feed someone blue food without their consent.”
As he cut the dough into strips, added the cheese fillings: “We skipped over a lot of the basics while getting to know each
other, you know. Like, what’s your favorite color? I’ll guess. Orange? Or is that just that you look good in it? What are
your favorite foods? What type of music do you like to listen to? I know what you like to read. Can’t say I’m surprised to
see James Baldwin in your bookshelves... but Octavia Butler? Didn’t know you were a sci-fi girl. Which is your favorite
Butler? Everyone talks about Kindred , and I see you’ve got Parable of the Sower , but I’m a big fan of the Xenogenesis Trilogy , actually...”
Finally, as he lowered the folded tortellini into the boiling water: “You know, my dad’s family had a soul food restaurant,
back in the day. He was supposed to take it over. He never went to culinary school, but he could make everything on the menu
and then some. And then he met my mom, and he realized that if he wanted to be with her, he had to leave his small town. My
grandpa understood, but my grandma was so pissed off that she didn’t speak to him for a year. But my dad did it anyway. He
was always brave in that way.”
Mal left the tray by her door, with a side salad (“Don’t be too impressed, this one’s from a bag,” he qualified.) and a glass of water, and then stretched out onto her couch and turned up his music (Frank Ocean’s “Ivy”) just loud enough for her to hear.
“I’m going to attempt to start my second book now,” he said. “You can come out and join me, if you want.”
She didn’t. When he looked up from his computer, the tray was gone, spirited away like an offering.
That was okay, Mal thought. He would be back tomorrow to try again.