“Of course,” she said. “Oh, and I saw that you sent me your proposal. I’ll take a look at it. We can touch base later this week.”
Mal nodded, but he knew it was impossible to think of anything other than Jo after that. She wasn’t answering her phone, and he quickly discovered that he had no way of reaching her. He checked her Instagram, but she’d locked down her DMs and turned off her comments. Her website’s contact page had been taken down, her blog password-protected. He sent her roommate, Dahlia, a direct message on social media, but a few hours hadpassed without a response. The only person he could think to reach out to was Ezra himself, and Mal suspected he wouldn’t be too keen on talking to “the other man.”
What Mal did know was where Jo lived.
“You can’t just give me a name,” the young man with a patchy beard who worked the front desk of Jo’s high-rise said. He gave Mal a look that could cut glass. “You need to give me a unit number. Otherwise, I could be letting a stalker upstairs, and that would make me pretty bad at my job, wouldn’t it?”
Mal clutched the edge of the counter and did his best not to curse him out. He’d driven to Lincoln Park right after his call with Amelia, in the worst of Chicago rush hour, and had spent the entire forty-minute drive convincing himself that showing up at Jo’s place uninvited wasn’t an absolutely batshit thing to do. His already frayed nerves were now shot to shit. He didn’t need this shrimpy little kid confirming his inner fears out loud.
“Can you at least try to call her?” Mal said, using all his remaining energy to stay cordial. “That’s what people normally do, right?”
“We value security a little more than normal places, sir,” the doorman said, but he picked up the phone and dialed. Mal heard it ring once, twice, three times, then go to voicemail. “Sorry. Looks like she’s not available. Maybe try to get her yourself and I can send you up.”
Gritting his teeth, Mal pulled out his phone, scrolled to Jo’s name, hit dial. It was a fruitless exercise; he’d already called three times today to no avail. To no one’s surprise, the call went straight to voicemail.
“Can you at least tell me if you’ve seen her?” he asked, desperate. “I just... need to know if she’s okay.”
Something in the doorman’s face shifted, a relaxation of his expression from hostility to something like pity.
“I’m going to be honest with you, man,” he said. “I haven’t seen her down here in a couple days.”
“Oh,” Mal said, even as terror gripped him. He’d only read a few of the articles, and none of them had been particularly gracious. “Okay. Well. Um. If you do see her, can you tell her that Malcolm stopped by?”
The doorman nodded, and Mal turned to the door, accepting defeat.
“Did you say Malcolm?” a high-pitched voice said from behind him. “As in, Waters?”
Mal whipped around. He was quite sure he’d never met the small Asian woman standing in front of him, but he was equally certain that he knew who she was. With her buzzed bleach-blond hair, vampire-black lipstick, and the ends of a fine-line tattoo roping up her neck, Dahlia Cortes would have been hard to miss.
“Yeah,” he said cautiously. “And, let me guess... Dahlia?”
“I am she,” she said. “Do you have a minute? I think we share a common interest.”
“Absolutely,” Mal said.
Dahlia answered Mal’s next few questions without needing to hear them:Yes, Jo’s still alive; no, I don’t think she’s okay; yes, I think she needs help; no, I don’t know how exactly to help her.She’d been on her way to the grocery store but insisted that they go to a coffee shop instead, which quickly changed to talking in the apartment’s business center when Mal brought up that maybe being seen publicly with another woman might make things worsefor Jo. Mal sat on one of the leather stools as Dahlia smacked a dusty old Keurig machine awake.
“Thanks for stopping by,” she said, turning around at the counter as the Keurig sputtered and spit. “Seriously. I appreciate it. She will too, once she comes around.”
“Have you seen her?” Mal said.
“Briefly,” Dahlia said. “I picked up a couple shifts in the ICU over the weekend, but I saw her right before she left for the benefit. I assume she spent the night before with you, after your book signing?” Mal nodded, warmth rising to his cheeks. “I saw her for like two seconds a couple of days ago. She grabbed something out of the pantry. I knew something was up, like, I’d seen some of the early stuff on social media, but thePostarticle wasn’t out yet, so I figured we’d talk about it later, but now—”
“ThePostarticle?” Mal interrupted. “What’s special about that one?”
Dahlia’s face fell. “Oh honey,” she said, then: “Let me send you the link.”
She did, giving him permission to save her number to his phone. This one, unlike the articles before, seemed to be focused particularly on Ezra’s mother, Renata Kovalenko, and read like the workings of a journalist who had been waiting for an opportunity to strike rather than a bedraggled intern scraping social media for controversy.
It is 1993, and Renata Kovalenko is walking the runway for Chanel’s Spring/Summer collection. She holds her own amongst excellent company—Naomi Campbell is only a few paces behind her in an iconic pink princess/punk set that remains in the American cultural consciousness to this day—but she isn’t yet a star. That will come later, after her seven-year-long affair with tech mogul Paul Adelman culminates in a multimillion-dollar wedding and the launch of her short-lived fashion line, Syla. At the time, however, Kovalenko is known most widely as a homewrecker. Her son, Ezra Adelman, is born in 1991, two years before Paul Adelman’s divorce from his first wife, Katherine Listroph, is finalized. Renata herself shows no shame for the circumstances of her marriage. “We fell in love,” she tells theNew York Sunthat same year. “What is so wrong about that?”
It’s a perspective that makes her infamous for a time, but Renata is careful to avoid negative press after that. In the fashion world, she’s known as easygoing and fun-loving, a personality she lets shine during her four-season stint as a judge onProject Runway. Her relatable persona helps to distract from her husband’s gaffes. That is, until May of 2009, when Paul Adelman is caught on video verbally accosting and eventually slapping one of his employees, then twenty-seven-year-old software engineer Aaron Jackson, at the afterparty for the release of Knydus’ 2010 Odyssey Operating System.
The assault is a PR nightmare. Knydus Engineering, like many tech giants, has a diversity problem—less than 2% of its new hires identify as Black. The slap confirms what many pundits have postulated—that Knydus Engineering does not respect Black talent... or people. The effect is immediate and enormous: Knydus Engineering stock plummets 13% overnight.
Only six months later, nineteen-year-old Ghanaian American Elion University student Josephine Boateng enters the Adelmans’ circle. Even at her young age, she is even-tempered and polite, homely, and the first in her family to go to college. She is also, conveniently, the same complexion as Mr. Jackson.
It is not uncommon for celebrities to have less-famous friends, but less common for said friends to be folded into their brand. We first see Josephine at the 2010 Knydus Chicago Children’s Ball on the arm of one Ezra Adelman. She appears again, just weeks later, in photographs of the family in the Maldives, and after that quite frequently as the younger Adelman’s de facto plus-one. In interviews, Ezra calls her his “best friend in the entire world,” Renata, “a remarkable young lady” and, on multiple occasions, refers to her as her “daughter.”
