Chapter 38 #2
None of them meet my gaze.
“Your friend losing her job is nothing to do with us,” my mother says.
“Then how do you even know about it?”
“I’m very well connected, sir,” Giles mumbles.
I push my hands into my hair and close my eyes for a second, trying to process what I’m learning. “What the actual fuck? Did they take it away from her because of your god-awful spring break photos?”
“I just told you.” My mother lets out an exasperated sigh. “It was nothing to do with any of this business.”
“The owner of the magazine wanted his son to get more reporting experience,” Giles says. “So it’s been given to him instead. As Her Royal Highness says, nothing to do with us. A simple coincidence.”
The owner’s son.
My heart plummets to my feet and continues dropping through the floor, through the armory below, and into the hot pits of hell beyond.
If that doesn’t prove to Lexi all her points about kids of wealthy, influential people being handed things on a plate that they don’t deserve, nothing will.
Something like that could very easily cause her to decide that she’s making exactly the mistake she thought she was in being with me.
“Will you please sit,” my father says. “You get overexcited when you pace.”
“I am not overexcited. I am absolutely furious and utterly appalled. And if you do not understand now why I moved to America”—I scoff and throw my palms toward the ceiling—“there’s no hope for you to ever understand any part of me.”
“Look.” My mother sits up poker straight and takes in a long, slow breath. “How about you call off this silly book idea. And we—”
“You know about the book?” My eyes must be the size of the equally hideous commemorative plates that sit above the Doulton figurines, but my parents look back at me blankly.
I stomp up to Giles, shoving my hands in my pockets because I’m frightened what I might do with them. “You told me you’d leave it to me to tell them about it myself. And I was about to do just that, you slimy, lying, fucking toad.”
“Of course we know,” my mother says. “Giles informed us the moment he found out. We have a right to know if you’re about to wash the family’s dirty laundry in public and damage all of our reputations.”
“So you lied yesterday at the church?” A spot of my spit lands on the end of Giles’s nose. “You said you’d give me a chance to tell my parents about the book if Lexi left. But obviously that was bullshit because you’d already told them. You just said that to get her to go.”
He pulls a pristine handkerchief from his pocket and dabs his nose with it. “In my position, you do what’s necessary to protect the people you work for, sir.”
Fuck me. I thought his insidious twisted ways couldn’t get any more conniving.
“Never mind all that,” my mother says. “What’s done is done.”
“Never mind?” I stab at my chest. “I very much mind that I was lied to and Lexi was manipulated into leaving because she thought she was doing the right thing for me.”
“Well, if your…friend”—she sniffs—“means anything to you, perhaps you’d be pleased if she got a new job that would make her happy?”
I throw my head back and stare up at the ornate, centuries-old ceiling, and just about temper the scream brewing inside me into a long groan.
It’s obvious where this is going.
When I right my head, all three of them are staring at me.
“So now you’re going to blackmail me?” I ask.
“Giles has already used that one on Lexi—told her to go home or there’d be more revolting stories about her in the press.
And now you’re going to use her as a tool to make me fold?
You’re going to tell me that if I scrap the book, you’ll pull some strings to get her an amazing job?
And all of this is because you’re terrified you might look bad in any book I write.
Clearly not without reason, because look how fucking hideously you’re all behaving. ”
“An old navy friend of mine is on the board of directors of The Sentinel,” Dad says. “The Sentinel is The Current’s biggest rival.”
“I know what The Sentinel is.”
“Well, they’re almost overtaking The Current now. In reputation as well as revenue.”
“Not hard since The Current isn’t exactly flush for cash,” Giles mutters.
“Anyway”—my dad flattens the newspaper on his lap—“they’re looking for a fresh face to cover the civil war in Yemen. Do you think your…friend…might like that?”
“Will you all please stop calling her my friend? She’s my girlfriend. She’s the woman I love and want to be with.”
“We all know that was pretend,” my mother snips.
“And you can’t exactly be with her if she’s in Yemen, can you?” Giles adds with a smirk.
“I assume that’s the point.” Everyone’s overwhelming desire for me not to be with Lexi is absurd. “Heaven forfend I should end up with anyone who’s not been to a Swiss finishing school.”
“Do you want the woman you love to have the career of her dreams or not?” my mother asks.
And here I am. A pawn that can’t move without putting itself in checkmate.
I have to give up the memoir. The memoir that’s tied to the documentary. The two things that together make up the only decent shot I have of supporting myself, of redeeming my character, of sharing my side of the story, and of, at last, publicly vindicating my behavior.
If I don’t, Lexi will be left job-hunting and probably several steps back from becoming a war reporter.
I fall back into the chair, a shadow of the person who strode in here a few minutes ago determined to put a rocket up everyone’s arse and show them I meant business.
They’ve woven a web around me, drawn me in, trapped me, and every way out contains a landmine—which is a mixed metaphor that Lexi’s writer side would probably hate.
“There has to be a way to sort this out that isn’t this,” I say without any conviction.
“There isn’t,” my mother says. “Do you want to publish the book? Or do you want your…friend…to have the job of her dreams?”