7. Chapter Seven #2
Debbie was actually the one who’d called Bailey there, but evidently victim and offender were easy enough to switch around in my ex-wife’s eyes.
The hotel, I thought, remembering. Bailey begging me to finish inside her. Bailey with two cups of coffee ready for us both first thing in the morning, wearing my dress shirt like a trophy and nothing else. Bailey telling me it was the best night of her life…
“He… he paid me,” Bailey said, obviously uncomfortable with the lie. “He said he’d give me ‘money for a cab’, but it turned out to be three hundred dollars. I didn’t ask—he just did it.”
“You sold this really well,” McKenna murmured in the current moment.
Back on the recording, Debbie clicked her tongue.
“That’s maybe a third of what you should’ve asked for up front,” she said, though her tone had improved.
“The tip is supposed to be a bonus for services rendered, not the whole payment. But it’s a start.
There’s hope for you yet.” She paused, and I could almost see her: lips pursed in thought, hand theatrically on her chin the way it always was when Debbie thought she was winning an argument.
“He’s generous without thinking about it, which is exactly the kind of sugar daddy you want.
The trick is to make sure he’s never thinking about it. ”
“Bitch,” McKenna muttered. “Three hundred dollars and you can hear her already calculating the payoffs on her credit cards.”
“Shhh,” Present-Bailey said, still holding my hand. “This part’s important.”
“So Walter’s a keeper,” Debbie continued. “Not that Walter is probably even his real name, but I guess it doesn’t matter. You said he was in his forties, right? Divorced?”
“Closer to fifty if I had to guess,” came Bailey’s voice on the recording.
Debbie sounded almost fond of Walter. She was cheerful, in the way a farmer cheerfully takes a chicken out back to cut its head off before frying it up for dinner that night.
“That’s exactly what you’re looking for.
Older guys like that, the divorced ones, they’re looking for someone to prove something to.
Doesn’t really matter who, as long as they’re attractive—and a lot younger.
” A little laugh. “That’s the beautiful part, sweetheart.
He’s not really paying for you. He’s paying to feel like a man again. You’re just the box it comes in.”
A knife made of ice slipped between my ribs.
“And guys that age will pay anything for that,” Debbie finished.
He’s paying to feel like a man again.
She’d said it so easily. With such certainty. Like the truth of it was self-evident.
You’re just the box it comes in.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I murmured.
Bailey—the Bailey sitting beside me—looked alarmed. “That’s not you, Daddy,” she whispered, putting a hand between my shoulder blades and rubbing in tight little circles. “I swear. I promise I know that’s not you, that’s nothing like what you and I have…”
I rubbed my sinuses and waited for the moment to pass. “I know that, babygirl,” I said. “I just didn’t realize this is what Debbie really thinks about me.”
“She thinks the same thing about me,” Bailey said. “She called me a box that makes you feel like a man…”
“I mean…” McKenna began.
Both of us stared at her.
“Hey, tomorrow night I’m gonna be a box you come in, too,” the auburn-haired coed chuckled. “Debbie can think what she wants. We all know she’s wrong.”
More scrolling. The recording filled with Debbie’s humming as she double-checked the texts, ready to dispense more pearls of fucked-up wisdom like a madam with a new girl:
Keep your eyes on the prize.
Keep your legs closed until the moment of maximum profitability.
Keep your soul somewhere your ‘Daddy’ can’t find it.
I listened to that awful silence as Debbie read the conversations that had boiled over into love between Bailey and I like a shopping list. Any worries I’d had that my ex-wife might recognize me in the words I’d sent to my daughter’s best friend had long since evaporated—it was clear that Debbie was picturing some other divorced guy, not me.
That she probably didn’t think I had it in me.
Then Debbie let out a surprised gasp.
“Oh,” my ex-wife whispered. “Fuck.”
Instantly I was on high alert. Next to me, Bailey suddenly couldn’t meet my eye.
Meanwhile, the Bailey on the recording was also trying not to panic. “What? What’s wrong?”
“You didn’t tell me he sent you this.”
Five seconds of silence. Ten.
“What is she talking about?” I demanded. “Babygirl, what is she…?”
“We forgot to delete one of the photos,” Bailey told me.
And just like that, I knew which one it had to be.
“Debbie—” It was recording-Bailey, mortified.
“I’m not judging,” Debbie said, clearly taken aback.
I heard her little amused sound, and knew that my ex-wife—a woman who’d sworn before God and the Methodist church twenty-one years ago to love and honor me for the rest of her life—was staring at the anatomy she should have recognized instantly, grading it like a piece of produce at a farmer’s market.
“Well.” Debbie said at last. “At least he’s hung.”
Bailey made a strangled sound. McKenna lost her composure entirely and started snorting into her wrist, trying to stifle her laughter.
I just sat there. Waiting for the anger to come. The betrayal. The humiliation.
And what came instead was relief.
“She doesn’t know,” I said, the words tinged with amazement. “Slept next to me for two fucking decades, and she doesn’t recognize my words. She doesn’t even recognize my dick.”
It didn’t sting the way I expected it to. Both girls at the table stared at me.
“She’s a stranger,” I said, a curious finality in the words. “Twenty-one years and she’s a stranger. Did she ever see me at all?”
The question hung in the air, unanswered. Maybe unanswerable.
Time moved on.
“Looks don’t matter,” Debbie pronounced, scrolling past the last intact piece of privacy SecondChance82 had left.
“The money is what matters.” I heard her move the phone—probably handing it back to Bailey.
“My advice: circle back to the tuition thing as soon as you can. Girls your age are always behind the eight-ball on student loans. Don’t ask directly—just plant it.
You want him to come up with it. Make him feel like the hero for offering. ”
“Okay,” the Bailey on the recording said. “I can do that.”
This time, the pause was longer. I could picture Debbie—relaxed, probably picking at her food now that the main thrust of the meeting was done.
She’d given Bailey her marching orders without ever taking responsibility for them, and she’d done her best to make my daughter’s best friend feel like shit while she’d done it.
“Are you even going to say good job?” Bailey whispered.
Silence.
“You’ve been pushing me to move forward with the app for weeks,” she said, letting a little bit of her irritation seep through on the recording.
“Bailey, get a whale. Bailey, if you want your dad to get out of prison before your fortieth birthday, you’d better come through for me. Bailey, you owe me…”
Debbie’s voice arrived a beat too late to sound natural.
“That is extremely mean of you to say,” she sniffed, sounding offended.
“Mean?” Bailey sounded incredulous. “Debbie, this whole thing was your idea. The app, the profile—I never would’ve thought to do something like this on my own!” Her tone turned almost desperate. “At least acknowledge that. Now that I’m finally doing what you told me…”
It was the most direct way Bailey had tried to get my ex-wife to slip up.
Silence. The clink of a coffee cup, the shout of an order from the kitchen.
“Come on,” I grunted. “Say it, Debbie.”
What we had already from this recording looked pretty bad. But if we could get actual confirmation, from Debbie’s own lips…
“Does it matter whose idea it was?” Debbie snarked. “You’re the one making the money.”
I groaned.
“Yeah,” McKenna said, like she’d just missed a headshot by a single pixel. “That’s as close as we got.”
“That’s pretty much the whole tape,” Bailey said. “We were hoping you’d tell us it’s still enough. That we can get her out of our lives with this, and get my dad out on parole...”
I thought it over. Did we have enough? Would this recording frighten Debbie badly enough to get her to let go of Bailey? To go no-contact with her former family and leave us alone?
To give Kevin’s brother the go-ahead to push Bailey’s real father through into parole?
Bailey and McKenna both watched, like I was the expert. Which I guess I kind of was.
“It’s good,” I finally said. “It’s a lot. But it’s not a smoking gun.”
Both of them looked crestfallen.
“She never says I made you sign up,” I pointed out.
“She never says I coerced you. What we’ve got right now is a woman coaching a girl through a con, and being cruel about it—which is bad, and I’m sure she’d hate for her new church friends to hear about it.
But it wouldn’t stand up in front of a lawyer.
Debbie could say the whole con was your idea and she was just giving you advice. ”
“It’s a piece, though,” I said, squeezing Bailey’s hand. “A big piece.”
She nodded, but she still looked upset. I could see her replaying the conversation with Debbie behind her eyes—telling herself that if she’d zigged instead of zagged, or if she’d chosen a different topic to lead with, she could have tricked my ex-wife into giving the game away.
Filing it away with ‘charity case’ and all the other awful things.
Her knee bounced under the table. It was doing that throughout the whole recording, but now it was faster. I couldn’t help but notice it.
And want to do something about it.
“Babygirl.”
Bailey’s head turned, the tone in my voice catching her attention.