Chapter 18 #2
I remembered Joey. Theater Joey, Jules’s college boyfriend with soft hands, performative feminism, and a face I had always wanted to slap for reasons that later proved prophetic.
They had dated for eight months. He had worn scarves indoors and once told Jules she was ‘emotionally withholding’ because she refused to pay his parking tickets.
I had hated him. Jules had loved him in the doomed way smart women sometimes loved ridiculous men.
“He kept them?” I asked.
“I guess.” She laughed once, but there was no humor in it. “Or someone got them from him. Or hacked him. Or he sold them. I don’t know and I keep trying not to think about which version makes me want to peel off my skin less.”
“They threatened you?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“With the photos.”
“Yes.”
“To get to me?”
Her face collapsed, her voice breaking. “Yes.”
For a moment, all I could hear was the city outside and my own blood rushing in my ears. I set the water glass down carefully because if I did not, I would throw it. Not at her. Maybe at the wall. Maybe at the whole world, if the world had been kind enough to present one breakable surface.
“What did you tell them?” I asked.
Jules flinched.
“What did you tell them?”
“They already knew so much,” she said quickly, desperately.
“That’s how they did it. They would say something, and I thought they were confirming, not asking.
They knew about dinner. They knew about him picking you up.
They knew you were going to work at Rowe.
They knew you’d been hired after emailing him.
They knew—God, Avery, they knew things I didn’t even tell them. ”
“What did you tell them?” I asked a third time.
Her hands were shaking now. “I told them you were stressed about him. That you liked him. That you were worried about the boss thing and the godfather thing. I told them about the first dinner, not details, just that it happened. I told them you had gone to his office after hours that day because they already knew you had, and they said they needed to understand whether someone inside Rowe was setting him up.”
I stared at her.
“I know,” she whispered. “I know.”
“Did you tell them about the skirt?”
She closed her eyes and my heart cracked in a new place.
“Jules.”
“I told them you were deciding whether to wear it,” she whimpered, crying openly now.
“I didn’t tell them the other part. I swear to God, Avery, I didn’t tell them that.
I didn’t know they had cameras. I thought they were watching the building.
I thought they were trying to identify who was watching the building.
They made it sound like they were trying to protect everyone. ”
“Everyone.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“No, I don’t think you do.” My voice rose, then broke. “I don’t think you understand what it felt like to have Callum tell me there were things out there, details they shouldn’t know, and then to sit here with you and realize those details came from you.”
She sobbed once and bent forward, both hands over her face.
I stood because if I stayed sitting beside her, I might punch her or shove her or crumble entirely, and I did not know which one would happen first. I paced the small living room.
Three steps to the desk. Turn. Three steps to the couch.
Turn. The apartment had never felt smaller than in that moment.
“You were my person,” I cried.
Jules looked up, devastated. “I know.”
“You were the one I told everything to because I didn’t know how to deal with it alone. I trusted you!”
“I know.”
“You made jokes about him. You told me wanting him didn’t make me bad. You asked if I felt safe.” My voice cracked hard on that one. “And then you gave them pieces of me.”
“I thought I was keeping the pieces from getting worse.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t.” She pressed her palms to her eyes.
“It doesn’t make sense now. It made sense when I was scared.
They said if I cooperated, the photos of me would go away.
They said if I didn’t, they would send them to my clients, my landlord, and my mother.
They had her email, Avery. They had my mother’s email in the subject line of a message with one of those photos attached.
They told me they weren’t interested in hurting you.
They said Callum’s enemies were going to use you worse if they didn’t understand the scope first. They said they could bury it. They said nobody would ever know.”
“And you believed them?”
“I wanted to.” Jules lowered her hands. Her mascara had smudged beneath her eyes, making her look younger and more wrecked than I had ever seen her.
“I wanted to tell you. Every time. I would pick up my phone and think, tell her, tell her now. But then I thought if I told you, you’d tell Callum, and he’d do something huge and terrifying because he’s Callum Rowe, and then whoever had my pictures would release them and yours too, and I just—” She choked on the rest. “I kept thinking I could make it stop before it touched you.”
“It touched me.”
“I know.”
“It didn’t just touch me, Jules. It put my naked body on a table in a room full of lawyers.”
She made a sound that hurt to hear. “I’m sorry,” she cried out. “I am so sorry. I know that’s not enough. I know it doesn’t fix it. I know I betrayed you. I know! I know.”
I wanted to stay angry. Anger made me feel less like the world had peeled me open and let strangers inventory my softest places. If I stayed angry, Jules could be on one side of the room and I could be on the other, and the wound would have a name.
Betrayal.
But she was sitting on my couch crying over photographs someone had used against her. She had betrayed me, yes. She had also been cornered. Both things were true, and I hated that truth more than anything. I hated the people who were doing this to us. All of us.
“Did you send them anything?” I asked.
“No.”
“Screenshots? Texts? Photos of me?”
“No.” She shook her head frantically. “No. Never. I answered questions. That’s all. I didn’t send them your messages. I didn’t send photos. I didn’t—” Her voice broke. “I swear, Avery. I swear on our friendship, if that still means anything.”
“It does.”
Jules stared at me and I stared back. My eyes filled again, which was inconvenient because I had intended to look stern for at least another four minutes.
“It still means something. I’m furious with you. I don’t know how not to be furious with you yet, but it means something.”
She covered her mouth, fresh tears spilling over her fingers. I sat down beside her again, leaving space between us at first. She did not reach for me. She let the space exist, which was perhaps the first smart thing either of us had done all evening.
“I forgive you,” I whispered.
Her whole face crumpled.
“But not in a cute way,” I added, because otherwise both of us would drown.
“Not in an everything’s fine, let’s braid each other’s hair kind of way.
I forgive you because I love you and because I know what it is to be scared.
I forgive you because whoever did this wanted to make us turn on each other, and I am not giving corporate Voldemort the satisfaction of that. ”
A sob escaped her. It sounded dangerously close to a laugh.
“But I’m still hurt,” I stated emphatically.
“I know.”
“And you’re going to tell me everything.”
“Yes.”
“Every call. Every text. Every email. Every exact word you remember. Every number. Every fake name. Every time they contacted you. Everything you told them and everything they told you.”
She nodded quickly. “Yes. Anything. Everything.”
“And then you’re going to give it to Callum. He will be angry. He has a right to be. So do I.”
“I know.”
“But he’ll understand blackmail.”
“He’s a billionaire. Does he understand anything under eight figures?”
“He understood me.”
Jules looked at me then, eyes red, face open in a way I rarely saw because she usually kept several sharp objects and jokes between herself and real sincerity.
“You love him,” she said.
I looked down at my hands.
It should have been too soon. Too complicated.
Too stupid. Love was a word that should have required more than two weeks, more than stolen office moments and crisis rooms and the strange, impossible feeling of being seen by someone who could ruin me and kept choosing not to.
But in my heart, sitting there next to Jules in that moment, I realized one thing.
I did love him.
“Yes,” I said.
Jules closed her eyes. “God.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean God help anyone who tries to take that from you.”
I looked at her. The guilt and the fear were still written all over her face, but I could see a sense of determination flashing in her eyes.
Jules was not Dana. She was not Benjamin.
She did not have a tablet, a legal pad, or a terrifying understanding of municipal politics, but she had always been dangerous in smaller, more intimate ways.
“Show me,” I said.
She hesitated. “Avery—”
“Show me.”
She pulled out her phone with trembling hands and for the next hour, we sat on my couch scrolling through the messages she had not deleted because some survival instinct in her had been smarter than her fear.
The woman who contacted her had called herself Becca.
There was no last name, of course. There was a number that probably went nowhere useful, an email address that looked professional enough to be fake, and messages phrased with the same bloodless menace Grant Vale had apparently brought into Callum’s conference room.
“They asked about the dinner three times,” I said, scrolling.
“Yes.”
“And my apartment.”
“Yes.”
“And when Callum picked me up.”
“Yes.”
“And whether I trusted him.”
Jules swallowed. “I didn’t answer that one.”
I looked at her.
“I said, ‘More than she trusts most people,’ then deleted it before sending.” She pointed to the unsent draft screenshot she had taken in some fit of paranoia. “I didn’t answer.”
My chest hurt.
“Thank you,” I murmured.