40. Graham
GRAHAM
My siblings crowd around the phone. I join them, slowly, like I’m walking over to a pit filled with monsters. Dani’s sitting stone-still at the table, a look of shock on her face.
It can’t be.
Someone else was kidnapped on that dark street a few weeks ago. There were no videos of me and Dani.
I peer over Hannah’s shoulder.
“Someone had a pet cam on their cat,” she explains as she replays it. “The girl just got home from a long work trip and was checking the camera because she thought her cat got fat, right? And she wanted to know what he was doing?”
The cat, thank God, is blocking half the frame.
So you can’t see my car—and yeah, that is my car, because that’s Dani in the background.
You only see her from behind. The video’s such poor quality, and she was on the other side of the street, two floors down.
But I know Dani. I know what she was wearing. And that’s her.
Do my siblings know? Do they suspect? Does Frank know?
I can’t look at him.
My mom starts crying. “That’s horrible. That poor girl.”
“Maybe it’s staged or some AI video,” I say, though it’s a gamble—Frank could read into it.
“Yeah, Mom,” Ryan comforts her. “It’s probably fake.”
“I mean, it’s so blurry,” Claire says slowly.
Frank just stares at the video.
“Let’s turn that off, Hannah,” Bridget orders. “Everyone is too hungover for this. It’s probably nothing, just clickbait.”
“Look at the caption on the video,” Hannah says. “It’s near where the Italian restaurant was. This happened the night we were at the restaurant.”
“Did you see anything when you drove home? Anything suspicious?” Ryan asks me.
Dani is cutting her bacon up into tiny little pieces.
“I wasn’t…” I shake my head. “I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t see anything. I don’t know who kidnapped that poor girl.”
“I told you. I fucking told you.”
The relief of my oldest brother slamming me into the wall of his office. The sharpness of the corner of the marble bust cutting my face. It’s better than the torture of sitting through brunch then the drive back to Manhattan with my family, the threat of that video hanging over my head.
“You’re going to go to jail.” Grayson looks heartbroken. “They’re going to lock you up in a box, and I’m never going to see you again.” Grayson hugs me to his chest. The way his body heaves—I think he’s about to cry.
“Grayson, Grayson,” I yelp.
“Stop it, all of you.” Aaron’s got his sociopathic insurance-agent face on. “I need you all to calm down, for fuck’s sake!”
“I have Vicodin,” Spencer offers us.
“Honestly.” Aaron sounds disgusted. “I’m getting ready to have you just dose them with it so I can take care of this.”
“Can’t you scrub it from the internet?” Spencer asks Finn. “You’re the software guy, and you know people who could.”
“We run afoul of the Streisand effect by trying to scrub it and bury it—it just brings more attention,” Finn explains. “I think we need to just ignore it.”
“You can barely see anything in the video. It’s blurry in the background. The cat’s blocking most of it.” Aaron nods.
“There are already people online saying it’s fake, that the girl who posted it is chasing likes.” Connor grins. “Give it a few days, and she’s going to get so many hate comments she’ll take it down herself.”
“No one’s going to investigate it,” Aaron assures Grayson. “They certainly won’t figure out it’s Graham kidnapping anyone.”
“It will blow over. Just stay calm. Don’t interact with it,” Finn adds.
Aaron takes a deep breath. “I know this is a tall order, but we all just have to act normal.”
“Really? Do nothing?” Dani hisses at me that evening.
She made steak and chive-and-cheddar mashed potatoes, but I can’t eat. I just pace back and forth in the living room.
“That’s what Aaron and Finn think, that it will all just be forgotten eventually.”
“I really cannot—and I can’t stress this enough—cannot have my mother finding out I was kidnapped and then lied about it. She will disown me.” Dani twists a dish towel in her fists.
“I will go to prison, Dani,” I whisper at her.
The cliché thing to do would be to say, “Why are we whispering?” But we both know why we’re whispering. Because this thing, this event that we both agreed had never happened, now has video evidence.
“Maybe we should talk to a lawyer,” Dani muses.
“No. Too many people already know about this. Let’s just keep pretending it never happened. You can’t even see who’s in the video. No one’s going to know. Please, God, let no one know.”
After choking down dinner, I’m trying to get Lulu to wear a wedding costume.
“My brother says he wants Lulu to be in the wedding. I don’t know why her skirt won’t fit. Lulu, stop fighting—you’re going to look cute. Don’t eat that silk flower!”
“Does Colette want that?” I ask.
“Nope, but it’s the only thing my brother has requested, so she has to, you know.”
I don’t know. It feels like she’s slipping, like I’m losing her. I kiss her desperately. “Do you love me?”
The doorbell rings.
It’s Frank.
We stand there and stare at each other.
He. Knows.
No, he doesn’t.
“Come in.” I widen the door. “We are trying on dog costumes.” I turn my back on him, like this is perfectly normal, like I’m normal. “I’ve been accused of overfeeding the dog, and now the custom flower-girl costume won’t fit.”
I mentally do a catalogue of what I have out in my penthouse—anywhere in my penthouse—that could look incriminating.
“Hi, Frank!” Dani chirps.
I cringe. It’s too friendly. He’s going to know we’re hiding something.
“Do you want some steak and potatoes? We have leftover cake from the party for dessert, and berries.”
Dani, stop talking. That’s how he gets you, if you keep talking.
“I already ate, thanks,” Frank says.
I want to jump in, to launch into an explanation for her weird behavior.
Do not talk.
I grind my teeth.
Frank looks at me. “Can we go into your study, Graham?”
“Of course. Dani, could you bring coffee?”
“No need.” Frank holds up a hand.
He follows me into the study. I sit behind my desk, though I don’t feel like I have the spot of power.
He sits across from me then leans forward.
“Your mom’s very upset about that video, the one where that girl is kidnapped.”
I didn’t do it! I want to scream.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure,” I murmur.
“I told her I’d dig into it. I’m retired, but I’d try to pull some sway with my old colleagues, see if we can get some more investigation.” Frank rubs a hand over his face.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“And what did they say?”
“They pulled the video from the girl’s camera. They’re analyzing it. Seems legit. That’s the only lead, though. And you.”
“Me?” I raise an eyebrow.
Frank’s staring at me now. “You were driving home from the restaurant. That street is on the route you’d take to go home. It happened around the time you would have driven right past it. You don’t happen to have a camera on that fancy car of yours?”
“It seemed like a needless luxury.”
I make a mental note to thank Finn for his paranoia about government surveillance.
“Hmm. So you don’t remember anything?”
This is where a guilty man would make up some excuse about why he wasn’t paying attention and inadvertently give away the plot. I’ve dealt with Frank for years, though. Learned that lesson the hard way.
“Nothing at all. Sorry.” I stay seated. Let him be the first person to stand up.
“Well,” Frank finally says, slapping his thighs. “If you think of anything, let me know.”
“Of course.”
He almost runs into Dani when he opens the door. The tray in her arms jostles.
“Have some coffee!”
Frank frowns. “I said I didn’t need any coffee.”
“Oh! Right. Yes—no coffee.”
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.
I take the tray from her, or try to. Dani has a death grip on it. I finally just let it go, but Dani’s hands catch up to what mine are doing, and the tray crashes to the floor. Lulu barks.
“Oh my gosh!” She’s barefoot.
I grab her around the waist. “No, I will do it.” I pick her up. “I don’t want you to cut yourself.” I carry her to the living room.
Frank has Lulu and hands the dog to Dani.
“Where’s your broom?”
“I’ll do it, Frank. I’m sure Mom needs you back.”
He nods once.
“Dani, what the fuck?” I whisper at her after he’s gone out the door and I made sure he was in the elevator and counted to a hundred. “What the literal fuck?”
“I wanted to hear what he was saying! Does he know?” she hisses.
“He didn’t know, but he’s suspicious. And you made him even more suspicious!”
“I’m sorry! Look, I think we need a contingency plan.” She pulls out her notebook, on which she has written KIDNAPPING CONTINGENCY PLANS.
“Dani, no.” I rip the page out of the notebook then rip out several more after that and rush to the kitchen, where I start boiling water. “We cannot write anything down. We need a plan. We need to get our story straight.”
“I think we say it was a weird kink thing,” she says in a rush.
“If there are other video angles—especially ones with sound—we are fucked. I am fucked. You don’t understand Frank, okay? He’s not going to let this go.”
“He’s retired, isn’t he?”
“He was this close”—I pinch two of my fingers together—“to catching Stuart. Even if Grayson hadn’t tricked Dad and Stuart into letting him out to go to that baseball game, Frank was going to find Stuart in the next week or so.
He was his number-one suspect. Everyone else in the FBI, the police, all of them—they had given up years ago, but not Frank.
He doesn’t give up. He’s going to find out. ”
I dump water into a blender then stuff the paper in and set it to pulverize.
“He might not find out,” Dani says, chewing on her lip. “There weren’t any cars passing us. I remember, I was looking for them.”
“It’s the twenty-first century. There are cameras everywhere.”
“We were on a commercial street,” she says, stroking my arm. “And actually there are fewer cameras than you think. Companies don’t want the liability.”
“Frank’s going to want to know why I didn’t come clean.”
“I’ll take the blame—say I had a weird fantasy, you know, play up the spoiled rich-girl angle, that I didn’t want anyone to know. But they won’t find anything. It’s going to be okay. Please, God, let no one know.” Dani lets out a breath.
“Also, in this country? No one wants to make rich people mad. You’re safe.” She laughs nervously. “And besides, if my mom gets wind of this, we’re all dead anyway—including Frank.”