I took a strangled breath. “I’m not doing this with you.”
“No? Okay then. I should go.”
No.I didn’t want her to go. I wanted to look at her and see the things I was ignoring. She looked gaunt, her hair limp.Her jeans were so low I could make out the V of her hips, her top ripped and tied into a knot above her navel like it might distract from how tired she looked.
“Are you sleeping?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But I suppose that’s to be expected.”
She turned toward the door.
“I didn’t,” I called, then cursed myself, because it sounded so damn desperate. I swallowed and started again at a more even volume. “I didn’t sleep with Caleb.”
She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t keep walking either.
“Just … so you know.”
She looked over her shoulder with that statement Harper hair toss and I thought,We have hope. We can make it through this.
We will be ourselves again.
“Why would I care?” she asked.
Because it didn’t really sound like it was Caleb you were upset about when I proposed that I might. Because maybe it mattered to you, who I slept with. Who I didn’t. And that mattered enough to me not to do it, so I—
Harper stepped out the door.
I listened as her car sounded on the drive. I couldn’t move again until all sound of her, all trace, had vanished.
Joel Ingram Reportedly Leaves Wife Harper Moore After Fight over Her Rivalry with Nadine Heywood
Joel Ingram “cheated on wife throughout their marriage” as More Women Come Forward Claiming to Have Had Relations with the England Soccer Player
“He told me I was the only one,” Says Model Kasia Bartosz, Who Names Joel Ingram as the Father of Her Unborn Baby
“He abandoned us both and we refuse to tear each other apart when the full fault lies with Joel,” Says Harper Moore, as She and Kasia Bartosz Are Seen Dining Together on the Hollywood Strip
“You’re friends with her now?” I asked when I saw Harper next. I’d driven to her house—she was in the Palisades now, only fifteen minutes from me. It was reassuringly close, especially now. The only time her hands ceased wringing together was when they were reaching for her glass of wine.
There were two ways this would proceed: Through, with time and years to put everything to rest. And out: to go to the police and give ourselves up. I knew I couldn’t do anything about it if Harper cracked and chose the latter, but our proximity to each other gave me the illusion that I could. Like I might get here in time to press the phone hook before she could finish dialing.
She was in a gated community, which saved me having toperform some dramatic monologue of seething hate before I could enter. For all anyone knew, I was here to visit one of the other celebrities behind its walls.
“She contacted me demanding to know where he was and what we’d said,” Harper said. “I claimed I didn’t have a clue who she was. Then all the other girls started to come forward, I phoned her, and we went from there. I’m going to pay her the child support she won’t get from Joel, she’ll get more of a publicity boost being friends with me than as one of Joel’s many flings, and making him look like an asshole validates the story that he skipped out on us all and ran away.”
I nodded—it was as good an idea as any.
“The tide’s going to turn,” Harper said, tapping nervously at her glass.
“Yes, I think it probably is.”
She took a shaky breath. “Do you want scotch?”
“Scotch?” I blinked at her.
She nodded and climbed to her feet. “Joel had a collection. Would never let me touch it. But …”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s crack that open.”
