Chapter 24
“What do I do now?” I ask the next morning, snuggled in bed with Rylie. I play idly with the hairs on his chest, and it isn’t until he gently flattens my palm against his heartbeat that I realize I was starting to pluck at them in my anxiety.
“With work?” he murmurs, tucking me closer into his side and placing a soft kiss to my hair.
“Work. My identity. My livelihood… The simple stuff that people rarely stress about.”
“I don’t know that your work being tied to your identity is a super-healthy thing.”
“Okay. Sure. But you also can’t even raw-dog vision so I’m not particularly eager to take life advice from you.”
Rylie lets out an indulgent chuckle, the vibrations caressing my cheek. “If journalism doesn’t work out, maybe give life coaching a try. You’re so gentle and uplifting.”
I smile, pressing a kiss to his pec before lightly biting the spot.
“You could do freelance for a while,” Rylie offers after a few moments.
He traces random patterns along my arm, lulling me into a happy drowsiness where I actually consider the idea.
“You’ve even said yourself that your Babble account has been getting more attention.
Maybe figure out how to monetize it or use popular pieces as pitches for different outlets? ”
I let out a long breath through my nose, wanting to argue, wanting to point out every idealistic flaw in his plan.
But maybe… maybe he’s right? Maybe I could figure out a way to do that.
I’d be pinching every penny and would have to dip into the meager savings I have, but at least it’s an immediate plan that doesn’t make me want to scream myself into oblivion.
I try to scrounge up the courage to admit I’m considering it, when my buzzer cuts through our golden bubble.
I jolt up, chest tight as my brain trips over itself with who that might be. What kind of heathen shows up unannounced at someone’s doorstep… besides Rylie. And… um… me, on occasion.
“Want me to get it?” Rylie asks, voice still groggy with sleep as I’m already scrambling out of bed.
“Hello?” I ask hesitantly, finger on my intercom.
“It’s me. Why is your phone turned off?” Aida’s voice sends a flood of relief through me, and my weight collapses into the unlock button as I let her in. A few moments later, she’s traipsing through my door.
“Oh, hey,” she says casually, shucking off her coat. “What’s up? Anything new?”
I can’t even muster up a good-natured scowl, folding into her outstretched arms as fresh tears start to pour.
“Tell me everything,” Aida coos, dragging her hand up and down my back. “Then I have a few things to tell you.”
She guides me to the couch, and I fill her in on my firing, the subsequent discovery of the video of me and Rylie.
It’s all so fresh, so raw, that each word is salt in the gaping wound.
For the first time in a long time, I find myself curled up in a ball, my head on Aida’s lap, pouring out my heart as she willingly and lovingly comforts me.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, pushing a tear-dampened strand of hair from my cheek. “That’s awful. You don’t deserve this.”
I cry harder.
“What did you have to tell me?” I finally manage, when my breath is ragged and my tears are all but dried up behind my swollen eyes.
With gentle hands, Aida guides me to sitting, repositioning us so we’re facing each other cross-legged on the sofa.
At the same moment, we become aware of Rylie standing in my bedroom doorway wearing one of my baggy T-shirts and a pair of my pajama bottoms that show off quite a bit of ankle.
“Hey,” Aida says, leaning over to pat the seat of the open chair. “You’ll probably want to hear this too.”
Rylie situates himself, pulling the chair closer so his hand rests on the back of my neck, massaging until I marginally relax.
Aida clears her throat as she decides where to start.
“Things seemed weird, at least timing-wise, with all of this,” she says, eyes narrowed as she looks up at me.
“I guess you could call it a hunch, but I felt something was off with how everything unfolded with Landry being so calm at the fundraiser and then the video being leaked.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Rylie nod, and Aida keeps going.
“I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right, so I had one of the tech guys at Soundbites do some digging on his off time—”
“A tech bro did you a favor?” I ask, mouth twisting with incredulity. A laugh catches in Rylie’s throat.
Aida frowns. “Of course not. I promised him a three-month subscription to Instacart if he helped me. Regardless, I had Brett look into the original video posted on social media and then some of the outlets that first reported on it. He went into all kinds of details that made my eyes glaze over but the important piece is, he traced the IP address of whoever originally leaked the video back to Soundbites.”
I stare at her blankly. I am a woman in STEM only in the sexy, tenacious, emotionally malicious sense.
Aida waves my confusion away. “Essentially someone at Soundbites posted the original video and sent it around to media outlets to make sure it was seen.”
“Wait, I’m sorry… Are you implying William took the video and leaked it?” Rylie asks, dropping his hand from my neck, disgust and rage etching lines on his face I’ve never seen before.
“Or Landry,” Aida says. “Who else at Soundbites would, you know?”
“Um, I don’t have a full list but it also wasn’t like I was some cherished member of the team there,” I remind her.
Aida rolls her eyes. “Okay. Sure. Fair. But look at the timestamp, dude. It was posted at five fifteen in the morning. Do you know how few people are at Soundbites at that time?”
As someone who drags their feet well past a nine o’clock arrival, I can’t tell if this is rhetorical.
“Not many, bitch,” Aida says, tiptoeing toward frustration that I can’t keep up. “So I had my boy Randy from security—”
“Who the fuck is Randy from security?” I ask, getting annoyed that not a single part of this story is explanatory to me.
Aida’s resulting frown could reduce most to tears. “Big Randy? You know Big Randy. He works the graveyard shift.”
I nod, remembering the jolly, kind man whom I’ve seen at the check-in desk on evenings I work late. He always dresses up as Santa at the company holiday party.
“Anyway,” Aida continues, pace picking up. “I asked him to do me a solid and check the swipe-in logs—”
“He’d do that for you?”
“Big Randy would do anything for anybody. But guess who was one of the few people who had used their badge to swipe in for work before the video was posted? William.”
“Holy shit,” Rylie whispers, voice scraping from his throat. “Do you really think…”
“I’m sorry, but time-out.” I straighten holding up my palms. “This is a big accusation first thing in the morning. When did you become some sort of super-tech spy girl, Aida?”
She gives me a dull look. “I try to give things a few hours’ worth of thought and fact-finding before sinking into the useless depths of self-pity.”
“That might be the most unrelatable thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“It makes sense, Eva,” she says, eyes wide and face animated.
“The bar’s in hell, but do you really think he’d go this low?
” Aida’s look speaks for itself. “Okay, sure, maybe he would, but surely Landry wouldn’t let him?
” She treated me like dog shit yesterday, but I have a hard time believing my idol, this woman who’s a living legend for breaking barriers in a male-dominated field, would do this to me.
“You need to stop believing she has any goodwill or kind intentions toward anyone but herself and her son. She had a major stake in the success of you two being public with your whole schtick. She’s fueling the nepotism pipeline with William, and his success is a reflection of her.
She championed the idea, promised big numbers with engagement and dollars, actually saw those projections being met and then some.
She and her son had a lot to lose when you said you weren’t going to play the game anymore, both financially and their professional credibility with other executives and board members.
She probably gave him a gold star and pat on the back for releasing it. ”
I chew on the inside of my cheek, shaking my head.
“Do you know who immediately reported on the video of you two?” she asks. “Soundbites. The first outlet to pick it up and start circulating. And guess what, the backlist of your other videos has seen an uptick from all this publicity too.”
The silence is a heavy weight, grinding into my shoulders as I try to connect all these pieces.
I rub my fingers to my temples, the pulse of a headache starting.
“She wouldn’t do that…” The woman I admired so much would have enough decency to spare me this kind of humiliation…
right? “She wouldn’t put me through this just for a corporate pat on the back and continued profits that would dry up eventually, would she? ”
The resulting looks from Aida and Rylie answer that.
“I’m turning in my resignation tomorrow,” Aida says as I continue to process, my mind a scribble I can’t untangle.
“I was thinking about waiting it out until she or William inevitably fires me so I could apply for unemployment, but even the fact that this is potentially true is enough. Plus, William and Landry’s fucking mind games are too much, all these cryptic and passive-aggressive emails about my performance when we all know I’m damn good at what I do.
I can’t keep living like this. I’m so stressed I can barely see straight most days. ”
I nod, my teeth grinding together as visceral memories ping through me.
While I hadn’t worked with Landry this closely before the incident, I know that Soundbites leadership in general takes a chronic hazing approach.
The late-night calls, the cutting remarks, the looks of disappointment—it’s all chipped away at me piece by piece until Landry decided to turn me to dust.
“It isn’t just us,” Aida says in a way that’s supposed to be comforting.
In some ways it is. It’s not like Landry or any of the other higher-ups handpicked us out of a lineup, deemed us the special ones to torment.
But in other ways, it makes it so much worse that we’re interchangeable playthings to poke and prod and stretch until we lose our shape and they decide to discard us.
“It’s like we’re dirt. Someone in the fashion beat even started a chat where everyone shares screenshots of the bullshit sent in emails and chats. Whoever receives the meanest comment gets a free drink at the end of the week.”
I jerk back, affronted. “I feel like I missed out on a lot of free drinks by not being included in that.”
Aida gives me a warm, loving smile. “You aren’t exactly the most approachable when it comes to a camaraderie attempt, babe.”
Fair enough. “I mean, I’m glad we’re all collectively licking the same festering wound here, but what do we actually do about it?”
“You could sue,” Rylie offers, as if the idea of even googling how to do that isn’t the most time-consuming and overwhelming thing I could ever think of, let alone pursue. “For wrongful termination or something like that.”
“This is America. I feel like you can pretty much be fired at any time for anything if your boss has enough power.”
“Not if you’re being bullied and harassed leading up to it,” Rylie says with a sad shrug. “Sorry, just trying to be helpful.”
“You think that’s what this was?” I ask, blinking as my brain whirrs. “Bullying?”
Rylie stares at me like I have three heads. “I witnessed William forcing you to read horrible things said about you online and record it. And we have pretty decent evidence that he leaked a private video you did not consent to having taken. What part of that doesn’t scream bullying to you?”
“While the small, awful things add up to a bigger picture of harassment, I could still see so many people calling it hearsay,” Aida says in a pragmatic but defeated tone.
Rylie turns fully toward me, his hands coming to my shoulders. “We know it’s not hearsay, Eva. So make people fucking hear it.”
“You mean…?”
Rylie’s nod is slow. Sure. A support beam in my crumbling life. “If anyone could do it, it’s you.”
I stare at him, my heart beating in an uneven rhythm, blood stinging as it pumps through my veins to every muscle. What he’s saying is ridiculous. Outlandish. A huge risk to the few threads of dignity I have left and my actively deteriorating self-esteem.
Rylie’s eyes scour over my face, reading everything there. “I support you no matter what, but I also know you’re the best, maybe the only, person to bring justice to all of this.”
He believes in me.
Holy hell, I believe in me. The thought seems so audacious, so radical, so much bigger than I’ve ever allowed myself to feel. Rylie doesn’t move, doesn’t even breathe as I stare at him, gathering my thoughts in rapid, fragmented pieces as I map out a plan. An attack.
Without looking away from his quicksilver eyes, I say, “Aida, think you could add me to that group chat?”