Mack purses his lips like he’s actively enjoying himself. “Triple fuck. Haven’t had one of those before.”
“This isn’t funny, Mack. I have the girls to look after. And Ophelia … this can’t come out.”
“I can’t match the text to either of your father’s phones,” says Brendan, more serious than his colleague.
“A burner phone?”
“Maybe, but I’m not sure. I don’t know how he’d have a burner phone ready so soon after that article went live.”
“He could’ve.” He had a hundred phones for a hundred crimes. “But he couldn’t have taken the photo. He was in New York that week.”
My mind whirs like a flip-book, a hundred different faces flashing up in quick succession. Shawn feels like an obvious possibility. Carmichael, maybe. I can name more than a handful of business and finance students who think of my father like some sort of hero, who’d do anything for him.
My question from earlier lingers, unanswered. The knowledge of what this truly means seeps beneath the fragile barrier of my skin, joining the grief and the exhaustion and the anxiety that already sit there. Ophelia is dealing with another anonymous threat. “Is she okay?”
“She’s in one piece, if that’s what you’re asking. She looked exhausted.”
Fuck.I look at the email again, trying to imagine the mental toll that sitting with this photo has taken on her. My presence—my family’s presence—in her life is an abscess, infecting all the healthy tissue around it. “I need to call her.”
“Not a good idea, not with this picture in the equation.”
My frustration is dangerously close to bubbling over. “Like me calling Ophelia is going to incriminate us any more than a photograph of us next to a body?”
“It’s not a great photo of you. Obviously, we’re aiming to track this photo down and bury it, but if it did get leaked, we have a solution. If we can claim you and Ophelia split before that night, you’d probably pass for someone else. That photo isn’t clear enough to identify you in a criminal case, in my opinion.”
Something clicks into place, and with it, a hot wave of fury boils my blood. I’ve been too busy to fully understand Mack and my lawyers’ decision to distance me so far from Ophelia.
They want her far enough from me that she can be thrown under the bus if required.
Mack mistakes my silence for confusion, or a lack of confidence in his plan. “It’s not like you had a motive for what happened to Bancroft.”
But Ophelia had the perfect reason.He doesn’t say it, but it echoes around my office, deafeningly loud. Ophelia was looking for revenge for her parents’ death, and that makes her a perfect scapegoat for all our problems. “That isnotour angle. I am not taking that angle if it comes to it.”
“Alex, you have an airline, six minors, and your mother’s healthcare depending on you. Ophelia … to put it respectfully, if she went to jail—”
My knuckles turn white.Iwould care. It would matter tome. “I wouldn’t finish that sentence, if I were you.”
The ice in my tone must make them realize their jobs are on the line, because they both drop the idea completely and don’t mention it for the rest of the call. The rest of their updates are just filler, delicately placed to keep me sweet. Wealmostfound this, we’renearlythere with this, we’rehopingto do this.
Why is it that the best of the best can’t even catch my father’s scent?
“He will have to surface, Alex. Visit an ATM, rent a car, get gas, eat food. He will surface, and we’ll get him the second he does. Talk to your lawyers about whether calling Ophelia is a bad idea.”
I hang up and scrub my face in my hands. I swivel in the chair to face the bustling city below, trying to get a hold on my quickening breaths. Everything is piling up. Everything is too much and not enough. I can’t shake the feeling that Ophelia is in danger, that someone else is after her.
The chime of my laptop tells me my next meeting has begun, but my chest feels like it’s wrapped in chains.
I stare down at my shaking hands, trying to count my fingers through the panic that sinks its claws deep into my throat. I can’t catch my breath, can’t get a full inhale. I almost drop my phone, fingers trembling as I dial Harwood. He picks up on the third ring.
“I can’t breathe. I’m not going to make it to lunchtime.”
“You will. You can and you will.”
“I can’t breathe.”
“It’s a panic attack, Alex.”
A cold wave of dread washes over me. “Not this time. It’s worse. I can’t breathe. I can’t do it.”
