Page 145 of Boardroom Mask

“That’s about what I thought you’d say,” he snarls cruelly.

He unfolds his arms and takes one step into the room. Just one. He stops at the foot of the bed, hands at his sides, and I can see the veins standing out stark on the backs of them.

“That’s fine. I can do the reporting for once. Headline one: You had a child. You carried a baby, you delivered her, and then you handed her off to strangers. You gave your daughter away. An innocent soul who needed a mother, and youabandonedher.”

I press the letter against my stomach with both hands. My lips part but there’s nothing behind them.Abandoned—has there ever been a more vicious word in the English language? For all my degrees and all the books stacked up on my nightstand, I can’t think of one. Especially not the way he says it. It’s a hateful word. Ugly and barbed.

“I said you’d be a good mother.” He rubs at his jaw and laughs mockingly. “I don’t think it’s possible to be more fucking wrong.”

My eyes fall to the ground. If I could laugh, I’d laugh at what I see there. Because there’s a gray sock on the floor. It must have fallen from the duffel when I was cramming everything in. How sick and wrong. The last time my world caved in, there was a gray sock on the floor just like this. Different sock, different room, and a very different man standing over me, but my eyes found it the same way. They latched onto the smallest, stupidest thing in the room because everything else was too enormous to look at.

I keep my gaze on it now. Safe little sock. Can’t hurt me. Can’t call me a bad mother. Can’t break my heart.

“You know what happened to me,” Kir continues. “You know what my father did to my mother. You sat at that table and you listened to me tell you about a boy who woke up one morning and his mother was just gone. And the whole time, I was telling you that story, you were carrying the exact same one inside you and you saidnothing.”

The comparison is so unfair and yet so accurate that it splits me open. I want to scream that it’s not the same. I was nineteen and terrified. I did itforher, nottoher.

But I can’t even say for sure if that matters anymore. If anything does.

“You disgust me,” he spits.

With that, he turns and leaves. I look down at the sock again as the door slams closed and Kir’s footsteps fade away. This apartment has now seen both the birth and the death of the strangest, most terrible, most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me. Sex and joy, sorrow and heartbreak… All of it happened within these four walls.

Now, it’s just me alone again. Me and the sock, I suppose. Each without our matching pair.

I sink onto the floor and cry.

PART V

DEADLINE

60

JILLIAN

“Hello, darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again”

— “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel

I don’t sleep that night, not even a little.

My cousin’s pull-out couch has a pokey spring that digs into my lower back no matter which way I turn, and the sheets reek like mothballs. It’s a little quieter here than it is in Manhattan, but not by much, and every little sound feels like an icepick to my eardrums.

Macy went to bed at eleven with a sympathetic squeeze of my shoulder and a “help yourself to anything in the fridge, hon.” I’ve been lying here in the dark ever since, phone balanced on my chest, refreshing the same webpage over and over.

At 5:12 A.M., the page changes.

nytimes.com

LAZAREV PATRIARCH WANTED IN CONNECTION WITH WIFE’S DEATH; REMAINS FOUND AFTER 18 YEARS

An Exclusive Investigation by Jillian Pierce

There’s my photo next to the byline. I’m smiling in it, which is kinda amazing, seeing as how I no longer remember ever smiling in my entire life and I’m pretty damn sure I’m never going to smile again. Beneath it sprawls three thousand words of jaw-dropping revelations about Lukas and Elena and the NYPD’s intention to arrest him on suspicion of murder.

It’s the biggest story of my career.

And I feel… nothing.