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I finally made it to my office and found Shane and Susan talking outside my door. They looked up when I approached, and Shane seemed troubled. Susan's eyes sparkled like there was finally something interesting happening and she had waited for this for years. Could she have been the one to say anything? But no, she had only walked in on us that one time, and Erica and I had been very cool about everything. Susan hadn’t suspected a thing, I was sure of it.
“Did you see all the reporters outside?” Shane asked.
“No, what reporters?” I asked sarcastically. “Of course I fucking saw them, they practically attacked me.”
Shane put his hands on his hips and glanced toward my office. When I looked at Susan, she averted her gaze and cleared her throat before making some half-assed excuse about having to get back to work. I stepped into my office, and Shane followed me.
“Do you want to tell me what you were talking about with Susan outside?” I asked when he closed the door.
Shane pulled his phone out of his pocket, tapped on the screen, and handed it to me. I took the phone from him. It was opened on a news article with the headline, “Loomis Takes to Personally Training His Interns” at the top. The article was all about how I was sleeping with Erica, how she must have gained the position of executive assistant for sexual favors, and at the end it posed the question “What kind of service can Loomis offer when the foundation is so obviously flawed?”
“This is bullshit,” I cried out. “They’re making it sound like Erica is some kind of whore and that I didn’t work my whole life to get Loomis where it is today.”
“I know it’s a load of shit.” He was a lot more collected than I was. I was seething. “But you know what they're like. You can’t blame them. They have photo evidence.”
I scrolled down to the photos they had posted with the article. The first was a photo of Erica as she’d arrived at my apartment building, and there was another photo as she’d left the next morning. Someone had been watching her.
“This can be a complete coincidence,” I said. “She could have been in the building for someone else. The fact that we work together and she was seen at my place of residence doesn’t prove anything.”
Shane nodded. “You could have gone with that one if someone didn’t bribe the front desk to release her check-in times. You know they wrote down who she was visiting, right?”
Fuck.
“I have to call her,” I said and turned to my phone. I had to warn her what she was to expect when she came into the office.
“How did this happen?” Erica asked, and I could tell she was panicking immediately. She had been just as panicked when we had woken up together over the weekend. I thought about how I had told her everything would be fine, and guilt clenched at the pit of my stomach.
“Someone must have been watching the building when you came out in the morning.”
“This is exactly what I was scared of. How are we going to deal with this?” She sounded like she was close to tears.
“We’ll have to take it one day at a time,” I said.
Erica gave me an empty chuckle. “It’s ironic how this weekend I thought exactly the same about the relationship between you and me.”
I couldn’t focus on what she was saying to me. We were in deep shit, and we had to do something about it to get out.
“Should I come into the office? Wouldn’t it be better for me to stay home?” Erica asked.
“No, you have to come in. If you don’t, they’ll see it as you hiding out, and it will only make everything worse. It will look like you have something to hide, and they will take it as proof that they are right.”
“I understand,” Erica said, and we ended the call.
When Erica arrived, she walked in through the media frenzy the same way I had. She had been prepared for them and muttered “no comment” the same way I had. I had wanted her to take a back entrance to avoid the press, but the point was for her to show that she was there with nothing to hide. I watched the media bombard her as she marched toward the front door, and I hated that I had done this to her.
“It’s a shit storm out there,” Erica said when she reached the top floor. She looked stressed out and with reason. “Do you deal with this every day?”
