by Brenda Novak
He wasn’t sure he ever would.
3
Tuesday, December 8
When Emery’s alarm went off early the next morning, she fumbled around on the nightstand until she could find her phone and silence it. Ever since she’d arrived in Silver Springs, all she’d done was sleep. It was going on a week now, and yet she still didn’t have any energy. After pushing so hard for so long—to get her degree in Communications and Media Studies at Cal State LA; to graduate at the top of her class; to launch her career in television; to eat healthy so that she felt good and looked good, something that was important for an anchor; and to make it to yoga every afternoon, all while trying to maintain a relationship with Ethan on the sly—she’d nearly run herself into the ground.
Of course, some of what she preferred to categorize as exhaustion had to be depression. So many things had gone wrong at once, and not only little things. Her parents were breaking up. While divorce was pretty commonplace, it was still extremely painful, and this one had come as such a surprise. When she was living at home, they’d seemed perfectly happy together. What had changed? Her mother couldn’t explain the cause of the split—she said she didn’t know what went wrong, that her father hadn’t complained until he ended it all—and her father refused to explain what had led to his dissatisfaction, except to say that he wasn’t fulfilled.
And what was going on with Grandma Adele?
Emery winced every time she remembered her last visit to Boston. When she’d first walked into the room, her grandmother had said, “And who’s this beautiful young woman?”
Add to that the indignity of what Ethan had done and the loss of her job, and it was just too much.
How could he have recorded her? He must’ve set up a camera in his room, one he didn’t tell her about, and now her most private moments were being devoured, judged, ridiculed and shared by total strangers. She couldn’t stand the humiliation or the betrayal, not only by Ethan but by Heidi. Although she and her producer had never been the best of friends, she’d believed they respected each other on a professional basis. She’d never dreamed Heidi would allow Ethan to destroy her career—especially after he’d already destroyed her on such a personal level by posting that video.
Leslie Simone, a friend of hers and part of the camera crew at the station, had texted her to say she’d heard upper management talking about the situation. Losing both anchors at once had caused their ratings to drop. They needed to stop the bleeding, said that viewers were “attached” to the people they’d been seeing every day for so long. Leslie had gotten the impression they were going to take a step back from what they’d done.
Except...she hadn’t received a call. They hadn’t changed their minds about her.
It would be the ultimate irony if Ethan got to go on with his life as if nothing had happened. Of course it would be the man who was quickly forgiven, even though he was the one who’d pursued her despite the agreement they’d both signed when they were hired. He was also the one who’d insisted it didn’t matter what they did as long as it didn’t affect their work. And he was the one who’d become unbearably controlling, and jealous of anyone who had any contact with her—even her girlfriends. That was why she’d broken it off with him.
Was he heading over to the station right now?
A burst of anger gave her the power to kick off the covers and climb out of bed. It had been only three hours since she’d stopped watching episode after episode of Dateline and gone to bed. But she couldn’t miss KQLA’s morning show. She was dying to see if the station had hired a permanent replacement for her, or if they were still using that amateur Cindy Plank, who’d been after her job for years, as a temporary substitute.
More than that, she wanted to see if Ethan had been given his job back and was there, sitting next to Cindy.
Her hands curled into fists and her muscles tensed. She wasn’t sure what she’d do if she saw him on the screen. She was afraid she’d head to Los Angeles and drive her car into the side of the building that housed the station. The possibility made her that furious; she’d never felt such intense emotion.
Taking only enough time to pull on her yoga pants, which she’d peeled off before falling into bed, she hurried down the stairs.
As soon as she turned on the TV, she lowered the volume to where she could barely hear it; she didn’t want to wake anyone before they had to get up.
Ethan had better not be there...
They’d both broken the rules by dating, and they’d both been in the video that had caused such an uproar among their viewers. The more religious viewers had written in to complain about her poor character. The less religious viewers had made joke after joke at her expense.
Both reactions had been equally painful.
Her heart thumped in a crazy cadence, almost making her light-headed as she waited for the news to start. Was he in the studio, putting on his mic?
Calm down. He’s not there. The station would never hire him back. If they were going to change their minds, they’d hire me. I was better at the job than he was.
That was what she told herself until the news came on, anyway.
But then, there he was.
“You motherfucker!” she yelled.
“Is everything okay, dear?”
The first blast of the TV, before she’d turned it down, must’ve awakened Aiyana. Or Emery’s alarm going off in her room had been louder than she’d thought. The older woman was standing behind the couch in her nightgown and robe, but Emery hadn’t heard her coming. She’d been too highly focused, too engrossed in the questions swimming around in her mind and her own torment at the possible answers to those questions.
“He’s back!” She pointed at the screen. “He’s sitting right there, reading the news as if nothing ever happened. After what he did to me. He...he can’t get away with it. He’s destroyed my life. My dignity. My...my sense of worth and decency!”
Before she knew it, she wasn’t just telling Aiyana these things, she was screaming them, and yelling about what a bastard Ethan was and she couldn’t believe Heidi would let him get away with ruining her life.
A little voice in her head told her she needed to calm down. She never acted this way. It wasn’t right to do this to Aiyana, who’d been kind enough to take her in.
But once she let go of the monster inside her, there was no way to cage it again. She got so upset that she was afraid she might start throwing things or punching the wall, so she pivoted abruptly to leave the room—and knocked into a lamp.
It crashed to the floor, pelting her legs with glass, but she could scarcely feel it. Mortified that she’d been so thoughtless and clumsy, she dropped to her knees and grabbed a fistful of glass with the intention of cleaning it up so that no one would get hurt—and ended up cutting her hand.
“Don’t!” As Aiyana started toward her, Emery stood to search for the closest trash can. God, look what she’d done! The mess on the floor mirrored the mess of her life. Everything she’d suffered was coming to a head in that moment, tearing her apart, ruining all her hopes and dreams as well as tarnishing everything she’d accomplished in the past. And there was nothing she could do about it, not without inviting even more humiliation by trying to pursue justice.
She didn’t hear Dallas come up the stairs behind her, so she didn’t have any idea when he joined them—not until she found herself caught in his arms and held so tightly she couldn’t move.
Then all she could do was drop the glass she’d been trying to clean up, watch the blood drip off her fingers and sob.
* * *
“I’m sorry,” Emery cried. “I’ll leave now. Let me go. I’ll pay for the lamp and then I’ll be gone.”
Dallas could feel her body trembling against his. He could also see streaks of tears as he turned her around and she gulped for the breath to speak. When he’d been awakened by the screaming and cu
rsing, he’d jumped out of bed and jammed his legs into a pair of jeans, but he hadn’t even taken the time to button them, let alone don a shirt before climbing the stairs two at a time to reach the living room.
“It’s okay.” Aiyana came around the couch to reach them. “Calm down. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“It’s not okay.” She turned her face into his chest rather than look at Aiyana. “It’s not right that I would take what’s happening out on you. You’ve been nothing but kind to me. I’ll replace the lamp.”
Aiyana stroked her hair. “I’m not worried about the lamp. I don’t care about things—I care about people. I care about you, and you’re in a safe place here with us. You can stay as long as you’d like. Maybe you needed to let out all that emotion. But with time, you’ll heal. You have to trust me on that. I’ve seen plenty of broken people put themselves back together again. Dallas is one of them.”
Emery seemed to have regained control, but Dallas still wasn’t sure whether it was safe to let her go. When he’d grabbed her, she was trying to pick up shards of glass without a care for getting cut, and he’d seen what he thought might be blood on her pink yoga pants. He didn’t want her to hurt herself any worse.
“Bring her over here, to the couch,” Aiyana told him.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
At the intrusion of another voice, Dallas glanced over to find that his two younger brothers had also reacted to the noise. They were standing on the stairs and were, like him, wearing only jeans. Their hair was sleep tousled, and Liam had the waffle imprint of his comforter on his cheek.
“Nothing. We’ve got it,” Aiyana said. “You can go back to bed. You have another hour or so before you have to get up for school.”
“Is Emery okay?” Bentley sounded concerned. At the same time, Liam said, “What happened?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Aiyana responded. “Let us deal with this, okay?”
They were tired enough that they accepted her response without any resistance and shuffled back up the stairs.
Aiyana got a cloth for Emery’s bleeding hand and Dallas guided her to the couch.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled to him when he finally let go of her and helped her to sit down.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “What happened?”
Tears continued to stream down her cheeks as she gestured at the TV. “That’s him,” she said dully, holding her stinging hand to her T-shirt to staunch the blood. “That’s Ethan Grimes. They’ve given him his job back.”
Dallas studied the guy who’d been so vindictive to her. He was thin and certainly not unhandsome, with brown eyes, thick slashes of eyebrows and equally dark hair that he wore slicked back off his forehead. But as far as Dallas was concerned, he was also filled with self-importance and came off sort of...smarmy. Dallas wanted to say, “You fell in love with that asshole?” but bit his tongue.
“Here. Let me see that cut,” Aiyana said.
Emery held out her hand.
“Fortunately, it doesn’t look too deep.” Aiyana peered even closer at it. “I can’t imagine it will require stitches. For now, just hold this cloth on it until the bleeding stops and I can see it more clearly. I’m going to make some tea. That should be warm and soothing.”
“How can they do that?” she asked Dallas, referring to the station, as Aiyana went into the kitchen. “After the Me Too movement and all that lip service about correcting sexism? He signed the same agreement I did. And he’s the one who pursued me. He also caused the scandal, made it public.”
“I don’t know.” Dallas sat down beside her in case she freaked out again. He was waiting for an opportunity to check the blood on her legs, but it was too soon. He was afraid if he drew her attention to the fact that she was hurt in more than one place, she might only get worked up again. “They must know he was the one who put up that video, right?”
She shook her head. “He lied about it. Said his roommate must’ve put up a camera and posted that video online.”
“Why would his roommate do something like that?”
“Ethan claims he must’ve got off on watching us. And he said Tommy posted the video online because he was being pressured to move out, and he wasn’t happy about it.”
Dallas dipped his head to catch her eye. “Could that be true? Could it have been this Tommy person?”
“No,” she replied immediately. “Tommy would never do anything like that. He’s a nice guy. Heidi and upper management are only pretending there’s some confusion about who did what, so they have an excuse to be able to continue their relationship with Ethan.”
“Did you tell them that?”
“I tried.”
“And what’d they say?”
“That Ethan would never post something that would embarrass him as much as it would me, but it didn’t embarrass him. He’s proud of it. And he was happy he had something with which he could totally destroy me, especially because I didn’t see it coming.”
Dallas clenched his jaw. It was hard not to confront Ethan—to make him pay for what he’d done so that he’d think twice about using revenge porn to hurt any other woman. But Dallas knew getting into a physical altercation with Ethan would be stupid. Ethan deserved an ass whipping, but giving him one wouldn’t solve anything. The video would still be out there, available for those who were looking for it. Dallas would just get himself into trouble, and he’d promised Aiyana—long ago—that he would avoid that sort of thing. “So are you going to proceed with the wrongful firing case?”
She stared at the screen for several seconds, watching Ethan talk about a contest for gingerbread houses and a local Christmas tree event.
“Emery?”
She blinked. “I can’t face having this negativity in my life as long as it will take to sue the station. And I don’t want any more publicity, nothing that will remind people of that video and make them go look for it.”
“I understand,” he said. “But you can’t let them get away with what they’ve done.”
She dropped her head in her uninjured hand and began to knead her forehead.
After a few minutes, Aiyana came back into the room carrying a cup filled with hot tea. “Here you go. Try this,” she said to Emery. “Chamomile will help ease the anxiety.”
Emery managed a weak smile for her kindness but because of her hurt hand, Dallas took the cup and saucer and held it while Aiyana sat on the other side of her.
“They’re betting you won’t sue,” Aiyana said. “Or they wouldn’t have risked hiring him back.”
“They know I can’t, not without causing more damage to myself. And if I don’t win, it’ll all be for nothing.”
“All adults have sex,” Dallas said. “Or most of them, anyway. It’s a perfectly natural, normal part of life. So who cares if there’s a video of you on the internet? Other than trusting the wrong person, you didn’t do anything different than everyone else.”
“I wish I could be that cavalier, but even my family, relatives can see that video!”
“Only if they go looking for it. And if your family is watching it, there’s something wrong with them, not you.”
She surprised him by laughing, and he laughed with her.
“Look, maybe from the station’s perspective you shouldn’t have gotten involved with your coanchor,” he went on, “but office romances are so common I can’t believe employers still require their employees to sign such an agreement. Your relationship with Ethan wouldn’t have affected your work if he’d been cool. So why not flip off this douchebag and sue the station despite all the reasons they think you won’t? Remove his power to hurt you by refusing to care? Let them know that they’ve underestimated you?”
“I’ll think about it,” she said with a sigh.
“Okay. I’d like to see you do it, so I’ll keep my fingers
crossed,” he said with a grin. “Now why don’t you go change into a pair of shorts so that Aiyana can see if there’s any glass in your legs.”
She looked surprised when she saw the blood staining her yoga pants.
“We’ll get this taken care of,” Aiyana said gently, obviously eager not to let it undo all the progress they’d made.
“Okay,” she said with a sniff, and went upstairs.
“You’re so good with people,” Aiyana murmured when she was gone.
He took a sip of the tea he was still holding. “I learned from the best.”
* * *
Emery could’ve taken care of the cut on her hand and the ones on her legs. They weren’t that bad. But Aiyana insisted on checking them with a magnifying glass and removing the few slivers she found with a pair of tweezers. Once she was satisfied that she’d gotten everything, and that none of the cuts were very deep or threatening, she applied some antiseptic and covered each one with a Band-Aid.
“I’m so sorry about what I did to your lamp,” Emery said as she sat on the countertop. “I’m going to replace it. I want you to know that.”
“Don’t worry about it. Now that we’re getting married, Cal will be bringing over some of his stuff. I’m sure he has a lamp.”
“No, that’s not fair. I’ll buy you a new one.”
“Please don’t. Between the two of us, we have more than enough household items as it is. I promise.”
Someone knocked on the door. “Hey, I’ve got to shower if I’m going to make it to school on time.”
The voice had to belong to Bentley. He was the only one who had to leave for school. They were in Liam and Bentley’s bathroom, where the Band-Aids and antiseptic had been stored.
Aiyana applied the last Band-Aid, and Emery slid off the vanity.
“We’re done in here,” Aiyana said as she opened the door.
Bentley did a double take when he saw Emery’s legs. “Damn!”
