‘You think a rival did this?’ Elsa said.
‘I think... maybe... yeah, it’s possible.’
Elsa let the words sit for a minute. ‘Okay, well, we need to have a crisis meeting now. Your team and my team. We’re going to take this thing and we’re going to make it work for both of us.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. We need to work out the details. But I think we make a statement together, on video, saying that the audio is a fake, that it’s an attack on women. Mine is a female-owned business, yours is a female-built brand. Someone’s trying to drive a wedge between us with this, like, 1950s attack on your body. Like, as if we haven’t moved past theconceptof a perfect body.’
‘Yeah...’ Darla said slowly. ‘But you don’t make clothes above a size fourteen, right?’
‘That’s more a supply issue than anything else,’ Elsa said, as lightly as she could manage. ‘But I’ve been working on resolving that for the past two years. We’re bringing out a much more inclusive range next year.’
‘Why not now?’
‘Because I don’t just want to size up designs. That’s why larger women are so badly served. Designers design stuff that looks great on a size six, and then they just size up, and everything looks rubbish. I want to sell clothes that are designed from the first sketch, built from the first stitch, for the fuller female body. I want to do it right.’
Maybe sheshouldstart a plus-size range. She was convincing herself, the more she spoke. Maybe she and Darla and Robyn Henson should team up together. They could point to this ‘fake’ audio, this attack on all of them, as a starting point. It would make for great publicity. Oh god. She was sickening herself now.
‘Look, let’s meet at the warehouse at two, yeah? You bring your publicist, I’ll bring mine. Let’s make whoever did this sorry they ever came up with this horrible idea.’
‘Yes,’ said Darla. ‘And I’m sorry, Elsa. I’m really sorry this happened.’
‘Me too.’
Elsa ended the call. She put her phone carefully down on the table, and buried her face in both hands. Her head was spinning. Relief, guilt and fear warred for supremacy. How badly should she feel about this? Did she feel guilty because she really believed she’d done something wrong? Or was she just afraid of a public shaming?
Elsa’s words replayed themselves in a loop in her head. Her words and her tone of voice. When she’d been talking to Nathan all she’d been feeling was fear, but on the recording you couldn’t hear any of that fear. There was only snark and meanness. Oh god. She’d screwed up. She’d really screwed up. If Darla walked away, Elsa would becancelled—her entire business would die. Worse than that, they’d lose the house too. She was over-leveraged. She’d bet everything on this one endeavour working out. She’d been so stupid. She’d been stupid too when she’d ranted to Nathan. She could have talked to him about the Darla problem in a respectful way, akindway even. But she’d wanted to blow off steam, so she’d ranted like a child. And because of that, she could lose everything.
She’d hurt Darla, really hurt her.
Elsa comfort ate two more marshmallows, then put the jar away before Doris could see it again. She hated herself. For gorging on sugar and for being stupid and thoughtless and childish.
But...
But... she’d been stupid and thoughtless and childish in her own home, in a private conversation with her husband. So... how exactly had it gone public? Her eyes turned to her phone and laptop, where they sat side by side on the benchtop. These things were hackable. It happened all the time. Hackers took over your mic and your camera. She tried to think of all the conversations she’d had over her phone, or even in the vicinity of her phone or her laptop. She thought of the bath she’d had a couple of nights before. She’d been watchingSchitt’s Creekon her iPad; she’d walked around the bathroom naked. With shaking hands, Elsa turned her phone off. She closed her laptop, and shoved them both into a kitchen cupboard, firmly closing the door. Without her phone she felt bereft—completely powerless and cut off from the world. And she had so much work to do. She went to the living room to get her daughter.
‘Come on, baby. We’re going to the shops.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Metropolitan Remand Centre was a prison located at Ravenhall, about twenty kilometres from Balwyn. It was a maximum security facility where prisoners were held pretrial, until the outcome of their cases were determined, and occasionally when they had been sentenced but their sentences were under appeal. It would be Jack Miller’s home for the next year or two, as his murder trial made its ponderous way through the system.
Judith met him there at three p.m. on Thursday afternoon. Rocky had set the meeting up. It took place in a windowless interview room, deep inside the prison. Jack was waiting for her, his hair still wet from the shower. He was wearing a prison-issue grey T-shirt and pants. He sat, his hands shackled to a restraint bar attached to the meeting table, looking exhausted and shellshocked.
Judith introduced herself.
‘I have a lawyer,’ he said. ‘You can’t talk to me without my lawyer present, right?’
Judith nodded. ‘That’s right. If you prefer, I’ll leave now. We can try to arrange a time to meet when your lawyer is available. That will take at least a few days to set up, maybe a week or longer. Like I said, it’s your choice. All I can tell you is I’m not here to try to catch you out. I’ve got some questions about what’s happened, and I think you might be able to help me figure something out.’
Jack did not look reassured.
Judith took a seat. ‘I just want you to tell me your side of the story.’
‘Why? I’ve already done that, again and again. No one is listening to me.’
‘I need you to tell me again.’
