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I slink down in my chair as she passes. Hope she doesn’t see me or thinks to look for me.
Thankfully, she doesn’t. She’s preoccupied.
When her door closes shut behind her, I groan and bury my face in my hands.
I manageto keep a low profile until lunch. I don’t have an appetite, but I’d like to get out of here for an hour. Pretending I’m okay around my colleagues has been exhausting. And I think Dara is catching on that I’m not myself. She’s one of the other reporters in the crime section.
As soon as some of the others start to file out for their own lunches, I grab my purse and head for the elevators.
Claudia’s voice stops me. “Scarlett,” she says. “In my office.”
My blood curdles. She didn’t say “please.” She always says “please.”
I hurry inside her open door and hover at the threshold. “Yes?”
She motions to the chair across from her desk. “Sit.”
I have a brief flashback of being back at the Mitchell house and Magnolia asking me to do the same thing—to sit across from her, except there was a gun. All the same, a mingling of panic and upset rises inside.
I do as she says.
Claudia presses her red-painted lips together as she studies me. Her eyes are as hard and furious as Magnolia’s were.
The panic blossoms out, an anxiety attack looming. I grip the armrests to feebly try and ground myself.
Why isn’t she speaking? Why is she so mad? I expected her to be disappointed that I didn’t deliver what I promised yet…but angry?
“We’ve had a…development in the Jake story,” she begins.
“Oh?” My voice sounds faraway.
She collects a paper from the stack in front of her and slides it across the desk. Taps it once with her acrylic nail. It’s an email from Meaghan.
I lean closer to read, but she snatches it away, slides on her reading glasses, and begins reading. “Dear Claudia, I regret to inform you that I can no longer consent to my statements in the article.” She looks at me over her glasses for a pointed moment, then back to the paper. “Please consider this my formal request to not run the story.”
She sets the paper down. Rests her elbows on the table and folds her hands together as she thinks. She clears her throat before she speaks again. “Any idea this was coming?”
“No…I…” I swallow hard. “No.” Which is the truth.
“Any idea why she would do that?”
“No…” Well, maybe I do know. Because now I know the Mitchells. “She got cold feet?”
“That’s what I’m guessing.”
I think that’s likely. She’s worried about what the Mitchells will do to her when the story runs.
Or…someone already scared her. Jake could have grown some balls and told them about the article after I left. And then they threatened her to recant it.
Yes, Jake could have definitely grown a pair and blabbed to mother. Probably bragged about how he worked me over this weekend to earn my trust and get exactly what he wanted—more time. And the full story, so they would know how to combat it. And I fell for it like an idiot. Even after I had a moment of clarity and tried to run, he sucked me back in. And now I’m here, in Claudia’s office, facing the consequences of all those horrible decisions.
I suck in a breath to ground myself. This is what needed to happen, though, remember? The story needed to be cancelled.
“But that’s not the most concerning thing to me.”
Wait…“It’s not?”
“No.”
