Chapter Thirty-Four
Iwake up the next morning with a pounding headache. It’s dark in the room I’m in, and for a long, hazy moment, I can’t tell where I am.
My environment materializes as if out of dust.
I’m in a bed. I’m under the covers. I’m in the bedroom of the apartment with the curtains drawn. I have no recollection of getting here.
I put my hands over my eyes, my muscles feeling shaky and uncertain. The last thing I remember was being on the bathroom floor and all those people—who were they?
Arabella, I know she was there. And she was being a bitch, I think. But then again, she did get me home when I needed to get home.
The man—it was Alistair, I feel almost certain it was him. He had me in his lap. But then there was a woman there. Who had that been?
My mind’s eye squints through the blackened memory. The shoes. The legs. The voice.
Oh my god, was it Clementine?
Holy shit.
Well, that’s it. I’m going to be fired. They came over and found me crouched over a toilet, blacked out.
What happened ? I never get that wasted. I know I had that glass of champagne, then that strong gin, then some of that cocktail, but I only had a few sips of that. That’s enough to get a little too drunk a little too fast, but definitely not enough for me to get so sick. I’m sure of that.
That’s when I remember the whisper of suspicion from the night before.
Arabella.
Did she fucking drug me? Is she that bad?
There’s a sound from the other room and I sit up fast in surprise, then regret it as pain shoots through my skull as if I were being hit by a hammer.
“Fuck,” I say out loud.
I manage to creep out of bed, seeing that I somehow got into my big old Nike T-shirt that I’ve had since high school. I go over to the door and open it, hoping that it’s not Arabella. I don’t have energy for her. Who else could it be? Alistair, I assume. He’s the only one I can imagine.
But it’s neither of them.
“Cynthia?”
She jumps and then turns, almost dropping the ice tray in her hands.
“You’re up,” she says.
“You’re here.”
“You’re welcome.”
Another wave of pain passes through me. “Can you catch me up? I don’t…I don’t know what happened last night. I never get fucked up like that. I feel like maybe someone spiked my drink or something.”
“Go sit down, I’ll bring this stuff over to the living room. I don’t know everything, but I think I figured some of it out. Here,” she says, handing me a one-liter bottle of alkaline water.
I look at the clock on the wall. It’s almost eleven. In theory, I’m supposed to be performing opening night in one day. And I have less than twenty-four hours to be at the theater for my last rehearsal and prepping for the night’s performance.
Fuck. I thought one glass of champagne would be fine. I thought one shot would be okay. Sometimes it helps get me out of my head the weekend before a big performance. How had I been so stupid?
She comes over with a bowl of chicken soup and a small bowl of white rice.
“It’s probably not what you’d normally eat before a show, but trust me, it’ll save your life.”
“It looks delicious, actually,” I say, sitting on the ground to eat it from the coffee table. “But I’m confused, why are you doing this? Why are you helping me? I thought you hated me.”
“I don’t hate you. I hate Arabella.”
“I thought—”
“Yeah, well.” She sits down heavily in the armchair beside me. “We’ve been doing whatever we’ve been doing for like a year. She won’t commit. I get it. It’s fine. But sometimes it seems like she does things just to hurt me. She gets fixated. Like how she’s fixated on you. Not in a romantic way, but just like…an obsessive way.”
The first spoonful of soup seems to run through my body like magic. It courses through me, warm and reinvigorating.
“She set you up last night. She drugged you and she came home drunk, laughing about it. She was being such an asshole.” She shakes her head. “She said she used your phone to text Alistair, saying you needed help. But pretending to be you. Then she called Clementine from her own phone and told her what was going on. Clementine booked it down here and discovered the whole thing. Including the apartment, which I guess she didn’t know about?”
I nod. I’m starting to feel human again, but everything Cynthia’s telling me is making me feel like retreating back to bed.
“I don’t think she knew. No.”
“I guess from that she figured out you two really were having an affair. Which…I don’t know…were you?”
I look at her and I don’t need to say anything for her to understand the confirmation.
“It’s none of my business. No judgment,” she says.
“I don’t even know where my phone is,” I say.
“Oh, I found it over here, one sec.”
She gets up and then brings it back to me.
I open it and look through my texts with Alistair. Sure enough, last night, just before ten, there’s a text I never sent.
Come to the flat. I need help. Emergency
“I don’t even know how she knew where the apartment was.”
She exhales. “Yeah. That’s how I found the apartment. Can I see your phone?”
I hand it to her and she sits down on the ground next to me, opening one of the apps that came with the phone. The Find My app, which is supposed to be used for finding lost devices and sharing locations with trusted people.
And yet, under the People tab, I can see that my location is shared with Arabella.
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah, she did the same thing to me when we first started hooking up. That’s how I knew to look. That was back when she gave a shit about stalking me.” She laughs gravely.
“This is insane. How long has she been—”
As I ask the question, I realize that there’s a very good chance she was the one to send the paparazzi to the Seven the other night. That would make sense. But why? Why does she want me punished?
I remember now that, last night, I’d had a moment of confusion about how she knew where to take me when we got in the cab to go home.
“She’s pretty nuclear when she wants to fuck someone up,” Cynthia says.
“Why does she want me destroyed like this? If she wants me fired, why the hell did she ever even get me connected to the company? It was her help that got me in. I would have had no way in. She worked so hard to help me in the beginning.”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry. The only thing I know is that it probably has something to do with the fact that…fuck.”
“What?”
“Last night, after she went to sleep, I went through her phone. Everything seemed off, and I’m not proud of it. I shouldn’t have done it, except—I don’t know, if I hadn’t come over here…” She gives me a look and then says, “You were in pretty rough shape.”
“Thank you for helping me.”
“That’s not why I’m saying it, I’m saying it because I kind of can’t believe that she left you like that. I knew she was catty. I knew she was a bitch when she wanted to be. But you could have died. You were on your back in the bathroom—I mean, if you’d been sick again…”
The awful truth of what could have happened hangs between us.
“Thank you,” I say again.
She waves away my gratitude, blushing a little. “Anyway, when I was going through her phone, I discovered that she’s been cheating on me. Or I guess not cheating, since she wouldn’t commit, but she’s been having a full-on…I don’t know, thing with—god, this is so weird—it seems like she was having an affair with Clementine.”
This shocks me, somehow. After everything.
“Oh my god. That explains so much.”
“Right?” she says, bitterly.
Yes. It does. I had thought, at some point, that maybe she had a thing going with Alistair. The way she acted was like a jealous lover. I knew she couldn’t feel that strongly about me, and the fact that she seemed so weird when I got sponsored by the Cavendishes—it makes so much sense now.
I’m so disgusted with Alistair, I can hardly breathe. He left me there. They all left me there on the floor. Regardless of whether they thought it was my own fault or not, they knew I was sick.
My memories may be vague, but I remember that he said they needed to call 999, but when Clementine threatened to leave, he followed her. He’d rather walk out the door with his meal ticket than take care of me when I really needed him. Needed anyone .
“It seems like Clementine is going to, or is at least saying she’s going to, leave Alistair. He’s running around trying to make money and hide it all over the place and Clementine knows all about it. She just didn’t know about you.”
Shame swirls in my chest. I take another life-giving spoonful of the soup and then chug some water.
“So did Arabella drug me?”
She nods her head sadly. “I feel like she did. It seems like it was her whole plan. To frame you. To show Clementine the apartment and fuck you up so you looked like a mess. Get you fired.”
“Yeah, I’m definitely fired.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for Arabella and what she did. She’s like a one-woman Shakespearean play. I’m sorry you got swept up in it. I’m sorry I did, too, but at least she didn’t come after me. She used to go through my phone and read everything and block people she thought were going to steal me away or who she just didn’t like or whatever. She’s vicious like that.”
“Right.” Then something occurs to me. I open my phone and go to Jordan’s phone number.
He’s blocked.
What the fuck ?
“Oh my god, she blocked my ex-boyfriend. She blocked Jordan. She blocked my—oh my god.”
My hands start to shake and my delicate-feeling heart starts to pound uncertainly as I realize that this means Jordan maybe did try to reach out to me. Maybe he did try to contact me. Maybe he called me when it was late and he was alone and missed me. Maybe he thinks I blocked him , or at least didn’t answer.
Oh my god.
Somehow, this is actually a silver lining. Arabella is obviously a monster, but at least this means all is not, maybe, lost with Jordan.
I unblock him immediately and then open the text screen, wanting to send him something. But what?
I shut off the screen.
“But why would she block my ex-boyfriend? What does she care if Jordan can reach me?”
“My theory is she wanted you and Alistair to blow up so Clementine was forced to end things. The more public it is, the better.”
“So she probably did send those paparazzi. God damn.”
Cynthia nods slowly. “I’m sorry I was ever a dick. I should have seen it sooner with her. It’s obviously over with her now. I’m not going back to that bullshit.”
“Good for you.” I finish the last of the soup. “Thank you for this. I feel almost totally normal again. And I owe you an apology. I’m really sorry I ever crossed a line into your and Arabella’s relationship. That was not okay of me. I just never felt very clear on the rules.”
“Ha. Neither was I. Anyway, I appreciate that, but we were never going to make it anyway.” She pauses. “And you’re welcome for the soup. Salt and protein, can’t go wrong.”
We smile at each other, and then I push myself up off the ground. “Okay, still a little shaky. What do you think I do? I haven’t heard anything from anyone about the show tomorrow night.”
She shrugs. “Just go in like everything’s normal. They’ll talk to you if they’re going to talk to you.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Something occurs to me. “Was it you who sent me that text? A while ago? Don’t trust him ?”
She laughs. “Yeah. Sorry for the cryptic way of saying it. I just didn’t want to get in the middle with Arabella and her vendetta.”
“Right. But why shouldn’t I trust him? It sounds like the whole thing was Arabella.”
“I just thought he was a dick. But then, Arabella was talking shit about him all the time. I guess it got in there. Maybe he’s not. I guess I knew something was off, just didn’t know where.”