Chapter 19 #3
Over the next few days, the story gets worse.
Every morning brings another headline about Blackwell Technologies, another analyst predicting what the investigation could mean, and another photograph of Julian or Adrian entering the New York offices beneath a crush of cameras.
Kate’s article is quoted repeatedly, its most inflammatory lines lifted into television segments and social media threads until the original context has almost disappeared entirely.
I stop watching after the second day, but the story follows me anyway through my phone, my laptop, and every email alert I have forgotten to disable.
My name is not in the headline, but it is still there beneath the article, attached to the reporting credits where anyone looking closely enough can find it.
Julian will have found it, and that certainty hurts more than I know what to do with.
I try calling him once more from my apartment, but the call never reaches him.
After what happened with Daniel, I cannot bring myself to call the office again.
I could keep trying, send an email, leave messages with PR, or force some other route through the wall Blackwell has built around itself, but every option creates another possibility I cannot control.
If Julian already believes I participated in the article, another call from me may look like damage control.
If his lawyers are monitoring communications, anything I say could become part of the investigation.
If someone inside Blackwell decides I used my relationship with him to gain access, then every private conversation we had could be dragged into public view.
Now there is something else to protect, and that changes every calculation I make.
I sit on the edge of my bed with one hand resting over my stomach, trying to understand how something still so small can already determine so much.
If the press discovers I am pregnant with Julian Blackwell’s child, there will be no privacy left.
They will count backward through Boston, Italy, every hotel, every interview, and every photograph of us entering or leaving the same building until they have constructed a story neither of us ever agreed to give them.
They will turn my child into evidence before it is even born.
The thought makes me physically ill.
I want Julian to know, and that is the part that keeps breaking me.
He deserves to know, and some part of me still wants nothing more than to hear his voice and tell him that I had nothing to do with what Grace and Kate published.
I want to tell him about the doctor. I want to tell him I am terrified.
I want him to tell me that whatever is happening around us does not erase what happened between us.
But wanting those things does not make reaching for them safe.
I have spent my entire career thinking through consequences before I move, and I cannot stop doing that simply because this consequence is mine.
By the end of the week, I stop trying to reach him, not because he has not called me and not because I believe what happened between us meant nothing, but because every path toward him now runs directly through the biggest scandal in the country.
I refuse to place my child in the middle of it before I understand what I am walking into.
The decision feels like tearing something out of myself, but it is still a decision I make on my own.
On Monday morning, I return to the office before most of the newsroom arrives and sit behind my desk for nearly twenty minutes before opening a blank document.
The resignation letter is shorter than I expect.
I do not accuse Grace of anything. I do not mention Kate.
I do not explain Julian or the pregnancy or why I cannot remain at a publication that took reporting gathered in trust and transformed it into something I had explicitly refused to write.
I simply state that I am resigning effective immediately.
When I finish, I print the letter, sign my name, and carry it to Grace’s office. She looks up when I enter, surprise flickering across her face.
“You’re here early,” Grace says.
I place the letter on her desk.
“I’m resigning.”
Grace’s eyes drop to the page before returning to mine.
“You’re quitting over the Blackwell piece?”
“I’m leaving because I no longer trust what happens to my work once I hand it over,” I tell her.
Her expression hardens.
“You know that isn’t fair.”
“I know exactly what happened.”
“You were refusing an assignment,” Grace says.
“I was refusing to distort one.”
Grace exhales and looks down at the letter again.
“You’re making a very emotional decision.”
Maybe I am, but for once, that does not make it the wrong one. “I’ve made my decision.”
Grace studies me for several seconds before asking,
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know yet,” I say, because that is the truth.
I leave before she can ask anything else.
By the time I get home, I feel hollowed out. My career has changed in the space of a morning, my relationship with Julian may already be gone, and I am pregnant, frightened, and suddenly uncertain about almost every part of the life I thought I understood two weeks ago.
I sit on my sofa with my phone in my hand and scroll through my contacts until I find Emma. She answers on the third ring.
“Sophie? Hey. Aren’t you supposed to be working?” Emma asks.
“Not anymore,” I tell her.
There is a brief pause before Emma asks, “What happened?”
I close my eyes.
“Emma, can I come stay with you for a while?”
Her voice changes immediately.
“In California?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
Another pause follows, softer this time, before Emma asks, “Are you okay?”
My throat tightens. “No.”
Emma does not hesitate. “Then come.”
I press my fingers against my eyes.
“I might need more than a few days.”
“You can have as long as you need,” she says.
“Just tell me when you’re coming.”
“Thank you.”
“Sophie?” Emma says.
“Yes?”
“You don’t have to tell me everything right now.”
The tears finally come. “I know.”
When the call ends, I sit alone in the quiet apartment with my resignation behind me and California suddenly ahead.
My hand settles over my stomach again as I think about Julian, about the life changing inside me, and about everything that could happen if either of them becomes part of the story consuming the Blackwell name.
For now, silence is the only thing I know how to give this child that feels remotely like protection.