Chapter 27 - Jillian
JILLIAN
“If I lay here / If I just lay here / Would you lie with me and just forget the world?”
— “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol
I storm back to the newsroom and drop into my chair so hard it flies backward and slams into Weston’s cubicle wall. He pokes his head around the partition, takes one look at my face, and retreats without a word. Wise choice on his part.
Gritting my teeth, I open a blank document and start typing like I’m trying to punch ten holes through my keyboard. Doug wants copy on the ribbon-cutting, so Doug gets copy on the ribbon-cutting.
But the copy Doug is getting is two hundred and fifty words of absolutely fucking nothing.
Kir Lazarev donates pediatric oncology wing.
Kir Lazarev shakes hands with hospital CEO.
Kir Lazarev crouches down to talk to sick children and hands out stuffed animals because Kir Lazarev is a wonderful, generous, emotionally well-adjusted human being with a completely normal and straightforwardly vanilla sex life.
Quote, quote, fact check, done. Another journalistic masterpiece by superstar reporter Jillian Pierce.
But the whole time my fingers are on the keyboard, there’s a second article writing itself in my head.
The real one. In this version, the CEO’s charitable smile is a shambolic fraud and his bare hands still have scabs on the knuckles from beating my neighbor unconscious.
In this version, Mr. Golden Boy climbs through windows wearing a black mask and leather gloves and whispers depraved fantasies against a reporter’s throat while a kill order from his own father looms over both their heads.
That version doesn’t get typed.
Not yet, at least.
I click submit on the puff piece and watch it disappear into Doug’s inbox. Good freaking riddance.
Then I grab my phone. I need something to take my mind off the disaster my life has become, and I know just the thing: Rae.
My best friend been radio silent for days.
She went gallivanting off across the Atlantic to God-knows-where with Lukas Lazarev—a man whose son just confessed to me that Lukas murdered his own wife—and hasn’t answered a single one of my texts.
I’ve been so deep in my own mess that I haven’t had the bandwidth to properly spiral about this, but the bandwidth just freed up, and oh, boy, here we go.
I pull up Find My Friends. The little green dot loads and I hold my breath. She’s been MIA for days, but I’m hoping…
There. She’s in Manhattan.
She’s here. She’s back.
The relief lasts about a quarter of a second before it gets completely bulldozed by fury. She’s been back and she didn’t call me? Or text? Not even a “hey, pulse check, proof of life, don’t worry”?
I’m fully aware that I’m redirecting. The anger I feel right now is not entirely—or even mostly—about Rae.
It’s about Kir publicly humiliating me at that gaggle.
While we’re doing the math, it’s also about Doug’s imminent deadline and Bartlett circling and Ochoa being gone and the bloody message I can still almost see the outline of on my shower wall.
It’s about all of that.
But Rae is the one thing I can actually do something about, so Rae is the one who gets it.
I open our text thread.
So you’re back in New York and you just weren’t going to tell me??
I’ve been texting you for DAYS, Rae.
I get that you’re going through stuff but I have been going out of my mind over here. You disappeared with a scary guy and you couldn’t send me one text to let me know you were breathing?
She doesn’t answer, so I drop the phone on my desk and press my palms against my eyes.
My throat is tight and my hands are shaking.
God, I despise myself. I know I’m being unfair.
Rae doesn’t know about any of the stuff I’ve uncovered.
She doesn’t know that every hour she was unreachable, I was imagining Lukas doing to her what he did to Elena.
But that’s the problem. She doesn’t know any of it, because I haven’t told her.
And I still can’t.
That doesn’t mean I can’t check on her, though. I need to know that at least one precious thing in my life is still safe. So I grab my coat off the back of my chair, shove my phone in my pocket, and leave without telling anyone where I’m going.
Rae lives in a walk-up near Barclays Center in Brooklyn. When I get there, I take the stairs two at a time and stand in front of her door, breathing hard, not from the climb but from everything piled up behind my ribs.
I knock twice, but she doesn’t answer. Nor does she reply when I call her name. So I dig through my bag for the spare key she gave me a couple years ago. I find it buried under loose receipts and a crumpled granola bar wrapper. The lock turns easily and I push the door open.
“Rae?” I call into the apartment. “I’m coming in, so if you’re naked or doing something weird, consider this your warning.”
I step inside and close the door behind me. She’s definitely not here yet, so I drop onto the couch and check Find My again. The green dot is moving in my direction. She’s heading south toward where I’m seated. Ten minutes out, maybe fifteen.
Fine. I’ll wait.
I sit on her couch and rehearse the speech I’ve been composing in my head the whole subway ride over. It’s a good speech. It covers the not-texting, the disappearing, the going-off-the-grid-with-a-man-who—
The lock turns. The door opens.
And every word I prepared dies in my throat.
Rae looks terrible. Her hair is pulled back in a limp ponytail and her eyes are swollen and red-rimmed. She’s wearing a bedraggled dress I don’t recognize that hangs too loose around her ribs.
Something happened. Something bad.
That’s confirmed when she sees me and her eyes bulge as she lets out a half-scream.
“Jesus Christ, Rae!” I leap off the couch. “It’s me! It’s just me!”
She is clinging to the doorframe like she’s gonna collapse into the core of the earth without its support. Her eyes are the size of dinner plates and she looks as if she just watched someone get murdered—which, given the company she’s been keeping, isn’t outside the realm of possibility.
“What the fuck, Jill?” Rae wheezes. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”
“I almost gave you a heart attack?” I plant my hands on my hips.
The audacity of this woman. If she wasn’t my best friend, I’d strangle her.
“Are you kidding me right now? You disappear off the face of the earth for three days—no text, no call, nada, zilch—and I’m the one who needs to explain herself? !”
She blinks at me. “I… what?”
“Three days, Rae.” I hold up three fingers and jab them in her direction so she can get a real good look.
“One, two, three. Seventy-two hours. I called you, like, ninety-five times. I texted you so much I’m pretty sure I developed carpal tunnel.
And what did I get in return? Nothing. Radio silence. I thought you were dead.”
At least she has the good sense to look guilty. As she should. I have been through the five stages of grief and looped back around to stage one at least twice.
“Bean, I’m so sorry. I didn’t have service. I was in France.” She pauses and frowns. “But how did you know I was back…?”
“Because I’ve been obsessively refreshing your location, you ding-dong.
The second your cell came back online and pinged a tower, I came to find you.
That’s the only reason I knew you were even alive.
” She gawks at me, which just incenses me further.
“I’m a reporter, Rae. It’s literally my job to find people who don’t want to be found.
” Crossing my arms, I add, “Also, you’re my best friend, and I was concerned that Lukas Lazarev had murdered you and dumped your body in the French Riviera. ”
I don’t miss how she winces when I say that name out loud. Oh, there’s definitely stuff here that needs unpacking.
“Well, he didn’t murder me,” she mumbles. “Obviously.”
“Ob-vi-ous-ly,” I back-sass. “But he did take you to France. What the hell is that about?!”
She looks everywhere but at me.
“It’s… complicated,” she sighs at last.
I scowl at her. “You vanished to another continent with a man who may or may not have killed his wife, and ‘complicated’ is the best you can do?”
“Can I at least take a shower first? I smell like booty.” She sweeps a hand over herself and I realize that she’s not just in a dress I’ve never seen before; she’s also dirty, stringy-haired, gaunt, pale. What the hell did the Lazarevs do to her?
“Fine. But I’m timing you. You have fifteen minutes, and then you’re telling me everything. Every. Single. Thing.” I spin her around and give her a gentle push toward the bathroom. “Go. Tick-tock.”
I stand in Rae’s kitchen and listen to the water turn on behind the bathroom door. Then I press my back against the fridge and close my eyes.
My hands are still trembling. I ball them into fists and shove them under my armpits.
This isn’t about Rae. I mean, it is, a bit, or a lot, but it’s not only about Rae. It’s also about me and what I’m going through. I want so badly to get my best friend’s advice, but I can’t tell her the truth.
Because if I do, who’s to say that what happened to Elliot doesn’t happen to her, too? Or worse? I can’t tell her that her boss’s dead wife might be buried under a construction site in Astoria.
Any of it could get her killed.
Any of it could get me killed.
I decide to make myself useful while Rae showers. It’s either that or sit on the couch spiraling, and I’ve done enough of that in the last week to last a lifetime.
I find her comfiest sweats and lay them out on the bed. I pour a glass of wine and set it on the nightstand. It’s not much, but it’s what I’ve got. Rae has always been better at the grand gestures. I’m more of a “quietly arrange your life while you’re not looking” kind of friend.