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Iris cringed at the reminder of her stupidity. Her blind trust in her “friend” who’d never really been a friend. She’d given Evan her password years ago, when the woman had needed to use her laptop after her own had died just before a deadline. Iris had used variations of that same password on the laptop since then. It wouldn’t have taken Evan long to figure it out.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Why? Maybe because you’ve never bothered to capitalize on the many advantages you were given. Stanford Carter was your father and mentor for fuck’s sake. This damned interview with Trystan Abbott falls in your lap. But you’re too—what? Principled? Good? Better than the rest of us mortal beings?—to take advantage of that fact. I did you a favor. You’re not that special, Iris. He’d have dumped you anyway. At least this way you’ll be remembered. Maybe even get ahead in your stagnating journalism career. And if I happen to reap a few benefits from it too, why not? We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“No. We’re not friends, Evan,” Iris had responded with absolute certainty. It was the only thing she felt sure of lately. “I thought we were. But it’s clear that I was wrong. We’ve never been friends, have we? You’ve been using me all along. You’re no better than a vile piece of shit stuck to the bottom of my shoe and it’s way past time I scraped you off. You ruined a man’s life, Evan. How can you be okay with that?”
Evan had actually laughed at her words. Iris cringed even now, a fortnight later, as she recalled the mockery in the woman’s laughter.
“That’s so precious. Little Iris trying to be a hard arse. I didn’t ruin his life. Far from it. Trystan Abbott is a movie star. Everybody loves him. And once the shock wears off, people will start to sympathize with him. Nobody will blame him for what happened to Trish Nesbitt. It wasn’t his fault, after all. She borderline stalked him.
“You, however, will always be remembered as the girl Trystan Abbott fucked in a moment of weakness and vulnerability. The woman who took advantage of his grief. It won’t take long for someone to point out that you’re not pretty or talented, and if he hadn’t been hurt and in mourning, he wouldn’t have looked at you twice. What do you think will happen then, Iris?”
Iris shivered at the memory of that taunting question. It had chilled her to the bone. The recognition that the public and press would inevitably turn against her, if they hadn’t already. That it didn’t matter how the story had got out, hers was the name in the story and in the byline. And she was the one who’d seemingly betrayed Trystan’s confidence. Nobody believed her protestations to the contrary. Nobody cared about the truth. Least of all Trystan. Everybody already believed the worst of her, and they would continue to do so. No matter what she said or did. And it had been unbelievably naïve of her to believe any differently.
She’d known then that she’d never see remorse, regret, an apology, or a retraction from Evan. And it was hopeless even trying to appeal to her conscience on the matter. She was riding high on the success of this article. She’d received the promotion she’d been after. Her boss had been fired. She’d done a shitty thing and had been rewarded for it. Why the hell should she feel any regret about that?
And it had all unfolded pretty much as Evan had predicted. A few days of rabid interest in Iris and her side of the story had quickly morphed into something else. Something darker. The questions yelled at her the few times she’d dared to venture out of her building had been overly intrusive and lurid queries about sex with Trystan:
Is Trystan a good shag, Iris? How many orgasms in one session? – that particularly unsavory gem had come from a leering old man with whom Iris had been acquainted her entire life. One of her biological father’s cronies. He’d proceeded to shout out questions about length and girth and preferred sexual positions. It had made her sick to her stomach and as soon as she’d fought her way back into the building and up to the flat, she’d lost her lunch. The questions had only become more profane and personal.
Trystan, meanwhile, had stopped hiding from the limelight. He was back with a bang. As Evan had predicted, the public had reacted extremely sympathetically to the Trish Nesbitt revelations. When approached for a comment about Trish’s death, he’d gone on the record to state that he had valued her as a colleague and as a friend, and deeply regretted her death and his role in the circumstances leading up to it.
Like an addict needing her fix, Iris picked up her phone—ignoring the hundreds of unread emails, texts, and voicemail notifications—to find the bookmarked interview Trystan had done just last week, with a well-known late-night television host.
He’d looked tired, his features thin and drawn. Her hungry eyes ran over those features with which she’d become so intimately acquainted and she felt that familiar pang of loss at the sight of his brutally shorn black hair. He’d gone for a military-style buzzcut. It suited him, of course—everything suited Trystan—but every last remnant of the man she’d fallen for was now gone.
Iris felt equal amounts of regret and resentment toward him, each emotion vying for superiority in her chest. It confused and frustrated her, these warring factions of hatred and love that had taken up residence in her heart and mind.
“Trish’s loss was a profound one to the industry and to me personally,” he said in reply to a question from the host. “My paramount regret about the resurgence of interest around the circumstances of her death is that it has undoubtedly reopened barely healed wounds for her family.”
Iris gnawed at the skin around her thumb-nail and hissed in pain, before tucking the digit into her palm. She’d torn the cuticle days ago and it couldn’t properly heal because she kept worrying at it.
The legendary talk-show host—Michael Holmes—was making sympathetic noises in response to Trystan’s words, his face contorted in an exaggerated expression of somber concern before he asked the question Iris knew—from repeated viewings—was coming.
“And this woman—this so-called reporter—Iris Hughes…” The man grimaced, as if the mere taste of Iris’s name on his lips was repulsive. “Have you spoken with her, or seen her, since your return?”
“I’d prefer not to discuss her,” Trystan’s voice had gone cold, and she could see the familiar frigid warning in his eyes and knew the man must have strayed off script.
“What she did was unconscionable,” the man persisted, despite the clear warning in Trystan’s voice. “An ethical breach. Will you be pursuing legal action against her?”
“Are you certain you want to continue this line of questioning, Mike?” Trystan asked with a thin sharklike smile. “You don’t want to ask me anything about Cryo Cop?”
“I have plenty of questions about your upcoming release, of course,” the host said with a wide smile and in an agreeable tone of voice, before continuing. “But before we get to that, I was wondering if you’d read the most recent leaked excerpts from Iris Hughes’s journal? It’s clear she has a host of psychological problems. Did her neuroses and anxiety issues remind you in some way of the problems you’d faced with Trish Nesbitt? It must have been traumatic, being trapped with someone like her. Traumatic and undoubtedly triggering. Since you did lock her in her room for a while, you must have felt threatened by her. Did she—wait, what are you doing?”
The last question, following the barrage of others, was panicked and high-pitched and came as Trystan pushed himself up from the iconic blue sofa that he’d been sprawling on like a relaxed cat just minutes earlier.
“I’m done.” Trystan said with an easy shrug, not an ounce of emotion in his level voice.
“But—” Mike Holmes slanted a panicked glance at the camera and then off to the right. “C’mon, Trystan, we haven’t finished yet.”
“I have.” He was tugging at the mic pack, before tossing an exasperated glare off to the side and asking, almost politely, “Can someone get this”—the next word was bleeped out—“thing off me please?”
He strode off stage, ignoring Mike Holmes’s repeated protests, while the camera tracked his progress until he disappeared backstage. They switched back to Mike, who stared blankly directly into the lens for a few seconds before blinking, and smiling with the practiced ease of a consummate professional. He smoothly apologized for the disrupted schedule with a forced chuckle and moved on to their next guest.
It had been Trystan’s only televised interview. He’d made a few red-carpet appearances before and after that—always stag—ignoring all of the inevitable questions about Trish or Iris.
After that disastrous interview, interest in Iris had ratcheted up from rabid curiosity to slanderous and sordid insults. Nothing was exempt from public scrutiny, excerpts from her journal—her private thoughts and insecurities, her innermost secrets, her sexual fantasies, everything that had happened between her and Trystan—had been released on an entertainment blog just hours before that interview. Iris wasn’t sure how, likely Evan, probably at the behest of Mike Holmes’s team.
