by Nic Joseph
“Northwestern Memorial,” I said softly, only because I had no energy to raise my voice. “We need to go there. Please. Now.”
Vanessa jerked and looked up at me in the rearview mirror, a frown on her face. “What?”
“It’s Keith.”
She didn’t say anything else, and a moment later, we were hurtling through the streets toward downtown Chicago. We hit a bit of traffic once we crossed into the South Loop, and that brought on a panic that burned deep down in my core. I watched the brake lights of the cars around me, and I hated them for standing in the way of me getting to the hospital. Vanessa did her best, dodging around cars and bikers like a pro.
We burst through the emergency room doors fifteen minutes later. As we walked inside, Jen’s head was down, tears in her eyes. I walked next to her, my entire body shaking so hard, it hurt. Vanessa led the way, talking to the attendants at the front desk, finding a spot for Jen to sit down and wait, and speaking to the young doctor who came out to greet us.
“You can come with me,” the doctor said to me.
Vanessa turned to look back at her daughter, who was sitting alone shivering in the waiting room.
“Do you want me to come too?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’ll be okay,” I said, turning to follow the doctor. “Thank you, Ness.”
It was all too much. It all seemed to be happening in slow motion, painfully reminiscent of the day when I’d been called in after the accident. I’d been in this exact position before—not the same hospital or the same doctor, but I’d been here. I’d been here before, once, which was one time too many. I didn’t know if I could do it again.
Vanessa and Jen stayed back in the waiting room, and I followed the doctor down a long, sterile hall. She was walking quickly, with purpose, and I struggled to keep up, my legs feeling like jelly beneath me.
She stopped halfway down the hall and turned to look at me.
“Mrs. Wileson?” she said, staring at me. “Are you all right?”
She frowned when I didn’t respond and then guided me backward toward a chair and helping me down into it. “Hey, can you do me a favor and grab me a bottle of water?” she asked a nurse walking by, and the woman nodded. The doctor leaned forward and put a hand on my shoulder.
I blinked and looked up at her. I wanted to scream that of course I wasn’t all right. I was scared and tired and guilty, but I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, all right.
I didn’t say any of that, of course, and just shook my head.
“Last time…” was all I managed to get out.
She stepped in front of me and looked into my face, realization dawning on her own. She spoke slowly, with what felt like trained patience, and placed a hand on my arm.
“Mrs. Wileson, you do know that your husband is fine, right? That he’s absolutely okay?”
“What?” I said, my mind reeling back to the phone call in the back of Vanessa’s car, the conversation she’d had with the nurses in the ER. None of the words they’d said had really sunken in after hospital, and I blinked, watching the woman in front of me.
“Your husband is okay,” she said, and she turned as the other woman reappeared with a bottle of water. The doctor unscrewed it and handed it to me. As I took a sip, I suddenly had the feeling that someone had said those same words to me before in the past half hour, but it hadn’t actually registered. She knelt down in front of me, and I suddenly felt silly, like I was creating a scene, another patient for them to take care of. “He lost consciousness at the swim meet, and we’ve determined that it was due to dehydration. He’s okay.”
“But last time…” I said again.
She shook her head. “I can only imagine,” she said, her hand still on my arm. “But this is nothing like last time. Here, let’s go in to see him. I think that’ll make you feel a lot better.”
She stepped back and allowed me to walk into the hospital room. It was small and cramped, and there was a curtain drawn in the middle of the room that hid a patient on the other side. Keith was looking up at the ceiling as I walked in, and he turned toward me when he heard the sound at the door. We locked eyes, and I knew instantly that what the doctor had said was both true and untrue.
He would be fine, but he was not okay.
I walked closer to the bed and swallowed, struggling to keep the tears in check. He looked so small, lying there in the hospital bed, barely filling it up. I hadn’t noticed that he’d lost weight, but here, in this sterile, white space against the backdrop of equipment that kept track of his every breath, he seemed to get swallowed up, and I could tell that he’d dropped at least ten pounds.
I took his hand, and he looked up at me, the sadness in his eyes making my heart break.
“Are you okay?” I asked, and I leaned forward. He didn’t speak. I could hear snoring from the other side of the curtain, and I leaned closer. “Keith?”
He opened his mouth, and then his face crumpled.
It took me a moment to react, because it wasn’t something I’d ever seen before. Not once. At most, I’d seen a tear roll down his cheek and settle in the stubble of his beard. At his grandfather’s funeral a few years back, he’d held his head in his hands for a long time and stared stoically at the floor while others sobbed around him.
“I’m not a crier,” he’d said during one of our early dates, over drinks. “I guess it’s just not how I process things.”
“Did you cry as a baby?”
“Yes, Paula. I cried as a baby. I’m not a psychopath.”
I had laughed and shrugged, twirling my martini glass between my fingers. “I’m just asking…”
Now, as I stood next to his hospital bed and his face scrunched up in the way faces do when they’re about to explode into sobs, I was frozen, unable to process what was happening. I knew how much his return to the swim team had meant to him, but I didn’t know how to handle his reaction. As the tears began to stream down his cheeks, I finally snapped out of it and moved closer, bringing my arms around his shaking body.
“Babe,” I said. “It’s okay.”
And it was in that moment, as I quietly breathed in his sorrow in that shared hospital room, that I thought about the phone that was buried in my purse.
The one that might be dead by now but, if not, probably had several more missed calls from a famous pop star on it.
I thought about what Vanessa had said—there should be a reward for keeping quiet about what I’d seen that night. And for whatever evidence, given Hooks’s reaction earlier that night, was undoubtedly on his phone.
A $180,000 reward.
I thought about Tiffane’s promise that she would leave Ryan the minute she heard even a whisper about another woman. And I pictured the woman from the park—Emma—and her face when I’d mentioned that I’d be going to see Ryan Hooks.
It was right then that I knew what I would do.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said again, and I pulled back and looked into Keith’s face. I cleared my throat. “Actually, I have some good news.”
He looked up at me and wiped at his eyes before taking a few long, slow breaths. “What is it?” he asked.
“The la-di-d’artists,” I said with a smile, swallowing as the lie began to form in the back of my throat. “They’ve decided to make you the primary recipient of the next Art Bowl. They told me yesterday, but I wasn’t sure when to tell you.”
The Art Bowl was an annual charity event that a few alumni from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago had been pulling together for the past five years. With contributions from the school, other former students, and community guests, it had become one of the largest crowd-sourced art fund-raisers in the city, raising money for a new cause each year. I’d talked to Tammy Davies, who led the effort, about the possibility of honoring Keith one year, and I’d never seen someone look more uncomfort
able in my life.
“You know how much we feel for you and Keith,” she’d said, her eyes darting around nervously as we sat in my living room a few months back. “But we can’t make a habit of centering the Bowl around one of our close and personal friends. The optics of that… Well, you understand, right?”
Of course I did, but it didn’t make hearing it any easier.
As the lie came out of my lips, Keith blinked and stared at me in confusion. Then his forehead scrunched up, and he pulled himself into an upright position and shook his head.
“What?” he hissed loudly.
I cleared my throat again. With him watching me so carefully, the lie was difficult to get out. “Tammy called me. They’ve all agreed. They want you to be the recipient of this year’s annual benefit. Which means—”
“Paula—”
“—which means we can afford it, Keith,” I said firmly. It was a risk, since he could easily call them to check, but then again, Keith hadn’t been in touch with anyone from the la-di-d’artists in nearly a year. I knew he’d be happy to let me send thanks for both of us if I offered. “It won’t cover everything, but it’s a step in the right direction. We will be able to afford the surgery with Dr. Reveno. There’s no sense in fighting this. They’ve already decided. I’m calling Dr. Bryant in the morning.”
“I don’t…” he started, but he shook his head again and dropped his body back onto the pillow. I could see that he wanted to protest, but behind that, I could see something else brewing. Something I hadn’t seen on his face in a long time and that made me feel better about the lies I’d just told and the ones I would have to tell in the upcoming weeks.
Hope.
Chapter 10
I opened the settings in my internet browser and deleted my search history.
Then I deleted the cookies.
Then I turned off the Wi-Fi and restarted my computer.
It was the third time I’d done it that night. It seemed that I couldn’t be too careful when it came to searching for things like how to blackmail someone or is all blackmail illegal?
I’ve seen the movies where the criminal is brought to justice years later because of some file they opened on their computer back in the 1990s.
I’d be damned if I was going down like that.
Before tonight, the worst thing anyone would’ve found about me was a search about how many glasses of wine a night made you an alcoholic. Now, I was seriously contemplating doing something that was not only embarrassing—it was immoral.
Illegal.
I was sitting on the couch a little after 2:00 a.m. Keith was asleep in the bedroom. The doctors had let him go home with a prescription for a lot of rest and a lot of fluids.
The nondehydrating kind.
How to blackmail someone had produced more than nine million results. I couldn’t believe the number of people out there who detailed exactly what was necessary to demand money from someone and get away with it. Some sites expressed that they were strictly designed for research; others stated that they in no way endorsed blackmail but wanted to provide the most comprehensive information about it. Why? Because that’s what people do on the internet.
Besides the how-to articles, I’d found lots of pieces detailing the difference between blackmail and extortion. It was reassuring to know that what I was planning to do wasn’t as bad as it could be. If anything, what I was doing could be called coercion.
The telephone and my silence in exchange for $180,000.
Hell, I’d call it a suggestion.
As I’d scanned through the pages, I tried to memorize as much as possible; there was no way I’d write any of it down. The articles all centered around a few key topics, which made it clear that there were three parts to a perfect blackmail.
One, I needed irrefutable proof of the deed.
In this case, the deed was Hooks’s affair with Emma.
I’d seen the way they had looked at each other through the night, felt the tension between them, even as they stared at each other from afar. I’d seen it with my own eyes, so I knew it was true, but I didn’t have proof. It had to be on the phone. Hooks’s reaction backstage made it clear that there was something on it he didn’t want me to see.
If only I could figure out how to access it.
Next, I needed to provide the subject (Hooks) with enough information for him to believe that I had the proof (whatever I found on the phone) and that I would be willing to give it over for the agreed-upon sum ($180,000). This meant that he had to believe that I wouldn’t still tell his secret after he gave me the money. That his pesky problem would go away for what, to him, would be a negligible amount of money.
And finally, I would need an untraceable way to actually get the money. In some ways, that would be the hardest part, but I decided not to worry about it until I got past the first two.
Once I had the proof and his agreement to pay the money, I would figure out the rest.
I reached into my purse and pulled out the phone. I pressed the Home button and saw that the battery was at 43 percent.
Shit.
I could, of course, go out and buy a charger for it, but that seemed like overkill, especially since I didn’t know what I’d actually find on it. I put it down on the couch beside me and started a new search on my computer: most common phone pins.
I scanned the results—all, of course, very appropriate articles about what to do if you forgot your own passcode. Unsurprisingly, the most common pins had to do with dates and numbers that meant something to people: birthdays, graduation dates, home addresses (past and present), area codes.
I’d already tried Hooks’s and Tiffane’s birthdays. It only took a few Google searches to find out that he’d graduated from high school in 1997, from college in 2001, and he’d once lived on a street named Parish in Cincinnati, house number 3882.
Thank you, internet.
I grabbed the phone and went to work.
Attempt four: 1-9-9-7.
Attempt five: 2-0-0-1.
Attempt six: 3-8-8-2.
Each time, I was met with a vehement no—the phone shook and alerted me that I’d used up yet another chance.
Four more incorrect entries, and the phone would be locked.
And then what?
Sighing, I put it back into my purse and picked up my computer again. I searched aimlessly for the next ten minutes, scanning articles about everything from his music to his relationships to his workout plan.
RYAN HOOKS AND TIFFANE SPOTTED AT COACHELLA
RYAN HOOKS: “WHY I DON’T EAT AFTER 6 P.M.”
RYAN HOOKS ACCUSED OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT
I frowned, clicking on the last one, my heartbeat speeding up as I did. It was about a woman named Amanda Strager, who’d accused Hooks of coming on to her during a video shoot. She’d pressed charges and then withdrew them days later, with a statement released by her representatives: “Ms. Strager has decided that it is in the best interest of all parties involved for her to withdraw her former accusations so that she can move past this very troubling time in her life.”
The same article quoted Hooks’s attorney, Stephanie McClean of Baker & Pikensy Associates, as saying that “the accusations are completely unfounded, and that is all Mr. Hooks will say about the subject.”
I realized there was a lot I didn’t know about Ryan Hooks.
I cleaned my search history one more time before powering down and closing the laptop. I picked up my own phone and opened my Twitter app. I only had to type his first name for his account to show up.
@RyanHooksOfficial.
I took a deep breath, and before I could stop myself, I followed him. Then I took my time composing a tweet.
@RyanHooksOfficial: Nice meeting you tonight and last Saturday, let’s connect
I let my finger hover over the screen, closed
my eyes, and tapped it.
I hoped it wasn’t too vague.
I stood up and walked past Shelby toward the bedroom. This time, she wasn’t pretending to be asleep, and in the moonlight, I could see her head raised as she watched me. She continued to stare at me for a moment, as if she knew I were up to no good, and then let her head drop back down on her mattress.
I watched her for a moment before walking into the bedroom and climbing into bed.
Whatever.
She couldn’t be judging me any harder than I was already judging myself.
• • •
The passcode came to me in the middle of the night.
I was dreaming about the two of them again. Ryan’s back as he stood outside Emma’s apartment building. Emma’s face as she stared down at him. In my dream, I wasn’t in my car at all but standing on the other side of the street, arms at my sides as I watched them. Suddenly, the scene in front of me became blurry, until just one element stood out clearly in the dark night—the address of the building, 115, the brass numbers clinging to the bricks.
0-1-1-5.
One of the most common passcodes is home addresses, past and present.
But not Ryan’s address.
Emma’s.
I sat up and crept out of bed, looking back at Keith as I did. He was on his back, his mouth open, his soft snores filling the room. I walked into the living room, where my purse was still sitting on the coffee table. I fished out Ryan’s phone and then held my breath as I typed in the four digits.
0-1-1-5.
If it didn’t work, I didn’t know what I would do—
But then suddenly, I didn’t have to think about that anymore. The keypad slid away from the screen, and just like that, I was instantly staring at the app-covered background of Ryan Hooks’s cell phone.
You have got to be kidding me.
I sat there for a full minute, staring at it, the bright apps seeming to dance in front of my eyes in the dark room. I began to scroll through them. Ryan had all the usual suspects: Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat. He also had a few games, more than one that looked like Candy Crush but were called something else.
