‘Do you believe him?’
‘I do.’ Vanessa had spent a lot of time thinking about this. ‘Robert is not a stupid man. If he was going to have an affair, it would not be with a patient.’ She paused. ‘It goes without saying, I hope, that he’s not capable of assaulting someone. He’s not that kind of man.’
‘Okay,’ Penelope said. Her tone was entirely neutral.
‘There’s more. Yesterday a courier delivered a USB drive. On it was a video that seemed to show Robert having sex with a patient in his rooms.’
‘The same patient?’
Vanessa shook her head. ‘A stranger. But the video is a deepfake. It’s a very good fake, and anyone looking at it would believe at first glance that it was him. There are certain details that aren’t right, but you would have to know Robert intimately to recognise them. I’ve arranged to have the video... de-verified, I suppose you’d call it, by an expert I trust.’
Penelope put her coffee down on the table. She pressed her palms together. ‘It sounds like someone’s coming after him.’ She paused. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘I need to make a decision about how I handle this, when it breaks.’
‘You think it’s going to break?’
‘Yes. Inevitably. The assault claim is already with the police. They’ll leak it, if they haven’t already. Or whoever is behind this video will start to send it out online.’
‘And you’re not sure how best to defend it?’ Penelope’s eyes were sharp. She had to be calculating how the situation would affect the show. It might drive ratings up. Scandal had that effect. But it might also destroy Vanessa, and without her,Let’s Talk, Australiawas a dead duck.
‘I don’t know whether I want to defend it at all,’ Vanessa said. Her hands felt cold. She tucked them between her legs.
‘I’m not sure that I understand.’
‘You know the world we live in, Penelope. Innocent or not, once this goes public, for the rest of his life Robert is going to be... I don’t know the right word for it. He’s going to have a certain aura. People will say,Do you remember when? Some of them will say,There’s no smoke without fire. All of that stuff. And if I stand beside him, then for the rest of my life, I’m going to be seen as the wife who forgave him. The wife who stood beside him. The Good Wife, basically. That’s going to be part of my identity.’
Penelope nodded, slowly. ‘You’re probably right.’
‘The way I see it I have two options. The first one is all-out war. I stand by Robert. I hire private PR and we launch a massive campaign. I bring him on the show and we talk about what happened. Ava could interview me and Robert together. We have a second show where we talk about the dangers of AI. The ease with which anyone can be targeted. We make sure that every man in this country is worried that it could happen to him next. We make Robert the poster boy for the innocent accused. We put him in front of the camera and we give him a platform to fight back.’
‘That could work,’ Penelope said. ‘If you do it right. The only thing is...’ She hesitated.
‘Say it.’
‘It’ll only work if he’s whiter than white. If he’s got a skeleton or two in his closet, an affair, some inappropriate behaviour with a colleague, then all of that comes out and he looks like just another skeevy guy, trying to cover up his crap.’
‘Yes.’
‘You knew I was going to say that. You’ve thought of it yourself.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is he whiter than white?’
‘I... don’t know.’
The strange thing about it all was that before the video she would have answered that question very differently. She would have said, with complete confidence, that her husband could be trusted. What had changed? The video was definitely a fake. Whoever had made it had done an excellent job deep-faking Robert’s face, but they hadn’t extended their efforts to his genitalia. According to Robert, the woman in the video was not the same person who had accused him of assault, but it seemed like too much of a coincidence that someone had sent a deepfake video of Robert ‘cheating’ to his wife, on the same day that a brand-new patient went to the police with a sexual assault accusation. So she believed him about that too. That the assault had never happened, that it was all part of some elaborate set-up.
And yet.
She couldn’t answer Penelope’s question with a straightyes, he’s whiter than white.
Because something had happened in the fifteen minutes or so that elapsed immediately after her first viewing of the video. She’d looked at her husband through different eyes. For a short time, the rose-tinted haze through which she’d chosen to view the small indignities of her married life had been scorched away, leaving nothing between Vanessa and the truth.
Which was that she didn’t know if he loved her. Or if she still loved him. Or evenlikedhim, the man he’d become. The truth was, Robert resented her. He resented her success and he resented the pleasure she took in her job. No... that wasn’t quite right. Maybe he just resented how much she was absorbed by it. Either way, somehow that resentment had grown over the years, and her guilt had grown along with it, Christ knows why, until they’d reached the point where, by silent agreement, he wasn’t even that nice to her, and she pretended not to notice. None of which made him a cheat, of course. But if he didn’t love her anymore... if he hadn’t, in fact, loved her for years, how confident could she really be that he’d stayed faithful?
‘So what’s your second option?’ Penelope asked.
