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C.J. nodded, looking relieved I’d finally caught up.
“Why would I—”
C.J. let out a short laugh and gestured around her. Like she was pointing out everything surrounding her—the conference room, the gold records on the walls—and the penny dropped.
“You think,” I managed to get out, my voice a hoarse whisper, “that I was trying to—to trick him?” I could feel my face burn, and I didn’t know how this had happened. I was the one who had been wronged here. He was the one who had tricked me!
“Darcy didn’t know who I was,” Russell said, his voice low and serious. “And for you to imply—”
“Then let’s not imply it,” C.J. said. “We can just say it straight-out. I’m finding it awfully coincidental that a huge Nighthawks fan runs into the son of her favorite rock star and then just happens to lure him into a compromising situation in which she has leverage for a potential financial windfall.”
I closed my eyes for just a moment, like I could make this go away. My mind snagged on the word lure. It wouldn’t stop reverberating in my head. Like nothing else that had happened with Russell and me tonight actually mattered. This lawyer—and her paralegal, on the phone—thought I was someone who had lured him to a hotel pool, not because I’d liked him, but for some kind of payday.
I felt suddenly like I needed to take a shower. The most personal thing that had ever happened to me was being dragged out into the light to be discussed by strangers. It made everything feel tainted. Like if my memories of tonight were on a piece of paper, it had just been crumpled up, and I’d never be able to get the creases out again.
“I didn’t do that.” My voice was shaking wildly, with some combination of anger and shame that was making it very hard to keep things together. And I knew I was about three seconds away from bursting into tears, which was the last thing I wanted.
“Nobody cares about me,” Russell said, and I saw his face was bright red. “They care about my dad, but nobody has any interest in what his kids do.”
On the phone, Sarah let out a quick laugh. “Sorry,” she said immediately. “That was unprofessional. Carry on.”
“Kid,” C.J. said with a sigh, “we’re living in a clickbait world, you know that. The pictures from Mallorca with Montana? You saw what happened there.”
“My older sister,” Russell muttered to me.
I realized two things in quick succession. The first was that—of course—Russell wasn’t the only child he’d pretended to be when he wanted to have something in common with me. And the second was remembering the scandal, and how when it had broken and made headlines, I’d read the story like it was entertainment.
“She was photographed jumping off a yacht that didn’t belong to her,” C.J. explained.
“Naked,” Sarah supplied from the phone. “Sorry—I just thought it might be relevant.”
“One of Montana’s so-called friends took pictures and sold them to DitesMoi,” C.J. said, shaking her head. “And it didn’t matter if anyone hadn’t heard about Montana Sanders before then. All you needed to hear was that Wylie Sanders’s daughter was behaving badly off the coast of Spain to get people to click on the article. Not to mention what happened with your friend, young man, earlier this year.”
I looked over at Russell, who was staring down at the table, his shoulders tight.
“So I hear about this,” she continued, gesturing to me, “and naturally—”
“No,” I interrupted. I could feel the first hot tear threatening to tip over, like it was balanced on a precipice, and I tried to will it back. “I didn’t do anything like that. I wouldn’t.” I crossed my arms in front of me, trying to hold myself together.
“I just—”
“Stop,” Russell said. He sounded angrier, and more serious, than I had yet heard him. “Enough of this. I lied to Darcy about who I was. I was the one who deceived her, not the other way around.”
I saw C.J. take a breath, like she was going to refute this, but Russell kept going.
“We met at a bus station,” he said. “She didn’t know who I was—I didn’t tell her who I was. We were both stranded there and we started talking. We ended up walking around, and getting to know each other…” He took a shaky breath. “We had a really wonderful night. It was… great.”
“That’s so romantic,” Sarah sighed from the phone.
“It really is,” her boyfriend agreed.
“Sarah!” C.J. said sharply.
“Right. Sorry.”
“So we’re done talking about this,” Russell said, a note of finality in his voice. “Nothing that you’re implying happened. Okay?”
C.J. looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “All right,” she finally said. She glanced over at me, and I tried to glare back, but I felt my lip wobble and looked down at the metal, covered by a layer of lacquer, reflecting off the lights in the conference room.
