“The lawyers are going to have thoughts.”
“I imagine.”
“Your communications director looked like she was going to be sick.”
“She’ll recover.” He loosened his tie, the same gesture he’d watched himself make in a dozen mirrors after four very long days. “What’s the internet saying?”
Dove looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at her phone, where the alerts were already coming in, a continuous stream of them. She scrolled for a few seconds. Something shifted in her expression.
“It’s not bad,” she said with surprise. “The response is…” She kept scrolling. “It’s not bad at all, actually. The taking-the-blame angle is—” She looked up. “People are responding to it.”
“Good,” Nate said.
“You did this for her,” Dove said. It wasn’t a question.
Which was good, because he didn’t feel like answering any questions right now. He put his jacket back on and reached for his phone. No messages from Jasmine, which he hadn’t really expected, but his desire hadn’t stopped him from checking.
“What now?” Dove asked.
He slid the phone into his pocket. He knew what now. He’d known since the night he’d sat alone in the kitchen and made himself be honest about the thing he wanted and the man he needed to be to deserve it.
“Now,” he said, “I hope that what I did out there actually meant something.”
He walked out into the afternoon. There were cameras waiting on the steps, but he just kept walking.
CHAPTER 30
JASMINE
Jasmine had stayed at her mom’s.
It wasn’t entirely intentional, the staying. The first night, she’d told herself she would go back to her own house in the morning, and then the morning had come with its notifications and news alerts and its various reminders of how comprehensively things had fallen apart, and she’d stayed. And then she stayed again. Her mother had made up the spare room with the good sheets without being asked and had said nothing about the length of the visit, just kept the food coming and the television off and the little table by the window set for two.
Jasmine had barely opened her phone in two days. She’d sent Eden a text to confirm she was alive, answered one message from Marco about a paperwork item that needed her signature, and otherwise left it face-down on the nightstand.
She moved around the condo like a ghost. The house was on the market, and she’d hired movers to go in and pack everything up. If she wanted to, she could never return there again.
But where would she go next? That was the big question. One she wasn’t ready to answer.
Her mom was happy here. She had her friends, her church community. She volunteered at the hospital a few days a month. She’d moved to LA for Jasmine, but Jasmine knew she wouldn’t move away from it for her. And Jasmine would never ask her to.
Whatever journey Jasmine went on next, she would undertake it alone.
It was a Tuesday morning, and she was sitting in the spare room reading, or rather holding a book and looking at it, which was as close to reading as she’d managed since she’d arrived, when she heard her mother come in from wherever she’d gone that morning. There were the familiar sounds — keys on the hook, shoes at the door, the soft movements of a woman who was being considerate of someone else’s quiet.
Then, after a moment, the low sound of the television.
Jasmine lowered the book. Her mother never had the television on in the morning. She was a radio person, always had been, preferred voices without pictures, said television in the morning was how you started the day already exhausted.
She waited.
The volume came up slightly. Whatever was on, it had definitely caught her mom’s attention.
She put the book down and came out of the spare room.
Her mother was sitting in her chair by the window with her hands folded under her chin, watching a press conference. The screen showed a long table with microphones, journalists visiblein the reverse shots. And at the table, in a charcoal suit that she recognized from the first night they’d ever spoken, was Nate.
“Mom,” Jasmine said, the word catching in her throat.
