Chapter 37 Spin
SPIN
Michelle
The messages were too much.
They were overwhelming.
All that buzzing on my phone had been a stockpile of voicemails from clients canceling all day long. Clients calling in shock. Leaving messages like, “How can we trust our sanity and therapy to you when you are playing therapy games with him?”
Colleagues ringing me up. Carla wanting to know what the hell had happened.
The last message was the worst. The newspaper called—the real paper, not a tabloid.
The reporter wanted to know if I had a comment on the New York Chapter of the Association of Intimate Relationship Therapists’ statement that its ethics division was opening an investigation into whether I’d slept with a patient and took advantage of him.
I hadn’t returned that call yet. That article was slated to run in the New York Press tomorrow.
Inside the safety of my own apartment, my brother tried to soothe me, but there was nothing to be done.
“We will figure this out. We will take care of this,” he said, echoing Jack’s sentiments from the plane.
The two men I cared most deeply about were here, having met in the most bizarre of circumstances when Davis was waiting at baggage claim.
My brother had wrapped me in a hug, and then shook hands with the man I was sure he’d rather not be meeting.
He had known we were together—I told him before I’d left for Paris who I was traveling with—but he didn’t know the details that were now being splashed all over the papers.
I curled up in a ball on my dove-gray couch, grabbing a blanket and huddling under it, clutching my phone. As if I could protect myself from more bad news by staying close to it. Making sure I didn’t miss a single solitary piece of shit being flung my way.
“Do you have any idea how this happened? How did someone get ahold of your emails?” Davis asked.
I shook my head, too shell-shocked to even think rationally.
“Who would have a reason to do this?” he said, continuing to prod. “There’s always a motivation. Whoever did this had to have motivation.”
I managed a humorless laugh. “You’re such a director. Always thinking about motivation. Even at a time like this.”
“He’s right,” Jack said, weighing in. “Someone has it out for you. Is there any chance it could be one of your patients?”
“No,” I said emphatically. I wanted to believe they wouldn’t skewer me like this. But I knew it would be foolish not to consider the possibility.
“Wait,” Jack said, snapping his fingers. “You mentioned something in Paris—”
The phone rang, stopping him and I flinched all over. “Let me answer,” Davis said firmly.
I shook my head. “It might be a client.” I put the phone to my ear. “Michelle here.”
“On the couch? Is that true?” It was Shayla.
“Hi. And no,” I said, because the time in my office was on the chair.
“Oh, thank god,” she said with a relieved sigh. “Anyway, I’m so glad you’re back. Because my husband is freaking out. When can I see you?”
I was amazed that Shayla was completely focused on herself when the world around me was cratering. But then, at least one client was interested in someone other than me, and I vastly preferred not being the center of other people’s attention.
“I just landed. We can set something up for tomorrow. Is that soon enough?”
Shayla agreed, but when the call ended, I latched onto something.
My husband is freaking out. Could it have been Shayla’s husband who did this?
Was Clark Shayla’s husband after all, using a fake name?
Was this his way of driving some sort of wedge between his wife, and the therapist he thought was encouraging her to leave him?
“Michelle,” Jack said, and I flipped over and looked at him, amazed that mere hours ago I’d been flying home, blissfully unaware that my career was being tanked.
“You said in Paris that you had a new client. You thought he was checking you out during a session, and then in the next one he knew too much about you,” he said, repeating my words back to me.
He’d remembered every single one. “Standard businessman, you said. He had dark hair, dark glasses. He looked like someone you bumped into outside your office.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Could it have been him? Did he take your phone? Did he have access to your phone at all?”
“No,” I said, but then I swallowed back the word as the memory unfolded before my eyes.
Clark coughing. Me leaving him to get water.
Was that enough time? “Well, there was this one time right before we went to Paris,” I said, and explained what happened during Clark’s last session.
“But he didn’t take the phone. At the end of the session, it was still there in my drawer where I keep it. ”
Jack shook his head, ran a hand through his hair. “He doesn’t have to take it. There’s software that can clone a phone like that,” he said, snapping his fingers. “All he had to do was have access to your phone for a minute, maybe two. Were you gone long enough?”
I went down the hallway. Opened the fridge. Didn’t see any bottled water. Grabbed a mug. Filled it from the tap. Walked back to the office.
“Yes,” I said as the chill seeped from my bones into my skin.
“He had to have done it. He took your personal phone while you were getting water and dropped an app on it that clones it. I bet that’s what he did. Then, when he was on his computer watching the cloned phone, he was able to steal your password to your email.”
My brain pounded against my skull. My mind was swimming, slipping further underwater, gulping for air.
“But my personal phone has a screen lock. My work phone does too. How would he have gotten past it that quickly?”
“It’s easy to break screen locks,” he said, grabbing his own phone, and showing me the screen.
I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be looking for until he tilted it in the light next to my couch.
When he had it angled just right, I gasped.
The streaks from his fingerprints revealed his own screen lock.
“The oils from your fingers. All he had to do was hold it just so to see the pattern you make.”
“You don’t use facial recognition?” Davis asked, sounding as frustrated as I felt.
“Of course I do, but it doesn’t work all the time. I still have to put my passcode in half the time.”
“And you can fool some phones with a photo,” Jack said, matter of factly.
Davis shoved his hand through his hair. “Are you kidding me?”
“I wish,” Jack said. “But especially with the rise of AI and sophisticated deep fakes, it’s getting easier.”
“For fuck’s sake, the world would be better off without smartphones,” Davis muttered, then turned back to Jack, pressing once more. “So it happened. Now the question is: what could someone possibly have against my sister?”
Something caught my eye on Jack’s phone. An incoming email flashed across his notifications, and I swore it was from Michelle with two Ls. My veins filled with ice. Before he could answer, I pointed to his phone. “You have a new email from me,” I said, in a dead voice.
From: Michelle
Subject: You like it dirty?
We can get a lot dirtier. You might want to back off. There’s more where this came from, and the Internet is full of people who’d love to post it.
Jack turned to me and my brother and gave us the answer. “They have nothing against her. It’s me.”
Jack
Her brother was a fighter. He had his fists clenched and was ready to go knock some teeth. I understood the impulse. I was ready to go to war for Michelle too. But I knew enough about battle to know this: you don’t go to war without understanding the enemy.
Everything you can possibly learn.
I had to apply restraint now. Casey had sent over a batch of photos from an art show last night, and had captioned them My half-baked attempt at playing Nancy Drew.
But that half-baked attempt might be what we needed.
I showed each one to Michelle. First, a baby-faced man.
She shook her head.
Next, a blond man.
“Not him.”
I clicked on a guy with slick dark hair who looked eerily familiar, and the fingers of my memory reached all the way back to the night I’d met Michelle.
I’d seen this man at The Pierson. This man had been watching Leo.
And watching Leo meant watching me and Henry and Marquita.
Watching me turned into seeing me with Michelle.
She shook her head. He wasn’t Michelle’s fake client.
“It started with him though,” I said, seething.
“They’ve been on us from the start. From the very first time I met with Henry, Marquita and her brother Leo to discuss it.
That was the night I met you. Conroy’s guys have been watching Henry and Marquita since…
probably since they decided to go after Eden’s real estate.
They must have been tailing them that night when we met.
Then they stayed on me, and saw me with you. ”
“What the hell?” Davis said, interjecting, as he held out his hands as if to say what gives.
“There’s one more picture,” I said.
I reached the last photo and the quick release of breath, the slow-motion change in her expression, and the way she dropped her head into her hands said it all.
“That’s him. Clark Davidson. That’s what he said his name was. Oh my god, I feel so stupid,” she said, and her brother sat next to her, draping an arm around her to comfort her.
“You’re not. He pretended to be someone else. You’re not stupid.”
She lifted her face. Her eyes were rimmed with red. “I even looked him up. I never do that. But I just got this vibe from him. I tried to track him down online. He said he was a market researcher, but I found nothing, obviously.”
I stepped away from them, and called Casey. “I need the name of the guy with the glasses,” I told her.
Casey answered quickly. “Nick Bradshaw. He’s second-in-command at a strategy firm.”
“Home address?”
She was quiet for a minute, typing away. “Nope. Private.”