“Shit,” I say.
“Yeah.” Dottie pauses for another long drink of wine. “Curtis Senior said he wasn’t sure he could ever forgive his son and that he’d never been more disgusted with anyone, especially since he thought so highly of me.” She rolls her eyes at the memory. “I’m sure that was all bullshit. At the end of the day, assholes always protect their own, right?”
“Damn right,” I say, seething.
“He said he’d wire me fifty thousand dollars. And on top of that, he’d pay off my student loans.Curt’s fuckupwould be embarrassing for the whole family if it ever got out, he said, and all he wanted was for me to feel like I’d been fairly compensated for my work, so that I could move on.”
This would explain the rift between Curt and his dad. That rich old bastard probably thinks he did something noble, but he’s just as evil as his son.
“That’s a hard offer to turn down,” I tell Dottie.
She scours my face. “You think so?”
“Absolutely. You’ve probably made more off that book than Curt has.”
“You don’t think I’m awful for taking it?”
It occurs to me that I’m the first person she’s ever told about this. She’s been carrying it alone for three years. The fury retreats a bit and some sadness creeps in.
“I really don’t,” I say gently. “I would’ve taken it, too.”
She looks down at her sneakers. “I don’t come from very much,” she says. “It was a lot of money to me.”
“Seriously, you don’t have to justify it.” I reach over and pat her knee, hoping I’m not overstepping. “But I still don’t get what made you come all the way out here.”
She lets out a long sigh, and tops off her own wineglass with the remainder of the Chardonnay.
“I started to scare myself,” she begins slowly. “I felt okay for a little while, you know, after I took the money. I still had a class with Bradshaw, and it was too late in the semester to drop it, so I had to keep going. I just sat in the back and stopped asking questions. But then the book came out, and it was like I just broke. They had a big display for it, in the window of the campus bookstore, and all the fucking press Bradshaw was doing kept getting retweeted into my timeline. It was just everywhere. And I felt this rage like I’d never felt before.”
I want to tell her she’s not alone. That sometimes, it’s like my own rage is threatening to burn right through my skin and incinerate everything.
“That must’ve been terrible,” I say, giving Dottie a sympathetic look.
“It was,” she says. “I didn’t recognize myself. And then I did the dumbest thing. I left a review for it on Amazon, warning people not to trust Bradshaw. I made my username three dots—you know, like an ellipsis?—but I knew Bradshaw would understand that it meant Dottie. I just wanted to get in his head, you know? Make him feel some of what I was feeling?”
I nod.
“I was sure he’d react in some way,” she says. “He must’ve been paying attention to his Amazon ratings. But I didn’t hear anything from him, which only made me angrier.” The wine has started to sand the corners off her words. “So then I sent an anonymous email to a reporter who’d written about the book. I assumed she’d have to forward it to him.”
I keep nodding, doing my best to absorb every detail. The fire pops again.
“That was the email Chloe told you about. I’m so embarrassed she found it.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. Chloe thinks the world of you. She said she thought you’d be the Fed chair one day.”
This makes Dottie laugh, which makes me feel better about forcing her to relive all this.
“Well, anyway,” she says, a faint smile lingering, then vanishing. “I was spiraling, and at some point, I started drinking before Professor Bradshaw’s lectures to make them easier to sit through, which helped a lot. So then I started drinking more, just generally all the time, and going to more parties and stuff with my roommates. I was never really into any of that before, but it was kind of becoming, like, a self-preservation thing.”
“Understandable,” I say.
“Then one night…” She hesitates, her eyes drifting toward the fire. “One night, I went to a party alone.” She toys nervously with a silver ring on her thumb. “There were these guys who sat in my section at the Mexican restaurant where I worked. They got me to do a couple shots with them when my manager wasn’t looking and asked me to come to their frat after my shift.”
I remember how humiliating it could be to wait on my classmates in college—bringing them round after round of Jägerbombs, only so they’d be so shit-faced that everyone found it hilarious to duck out without tipping. The rage heats back up to a rolling boil.
“It was after midnight by the time I got off,” Dottie continues, “and it was only Tuesday, so my roommates were already in bed. But I wasn’t tired, and the last thing I wanted was to go home and just lie there thinking about everything, you know?”
I nod.
