Page 155 of His Good Girl

I didn’t deserve a woman like her and I knew it.

Then I took her hand. unlocked the door, and stepped through with Avery beside me. Benjamin, Dana, and Tom were waiting outside. Benjamin looked at our joined hands and then at my face.

“Oh, thank God,” he breathed dramatically. “She fixed you.”

Dana’s mouth curved by one millimeter. “Told you.”

Tom looked like a man trying to decide whether the handholding was relevant to discovery obligations.

“We fight,” I announced.

Benjamin’s eyes lit like a city coming back online after a complete blackout.

“Actual war then?” he asked.

“Actual war.”

Dana straightened her spine. “Good.”

Tom swallowed. “I’ll call outside counsel.”

“Call them,” I ordered. “Then draft the injunction. Criminal referral, civil suit, preservation orders, everything. Marcus gets the mayor’s office on the phone immediately. PR drafts a statement that says we are the victims of illegal surveillance and attempted extortion without making us sound like we are a committee of frightened prey. Someone order food because we’re going to be here for a while.”

Dana pointed at me. “Better.”

“Thank you.”

Benjamin already had his tablet up. “And Lang?”

I looked at him.

“We’re going to expose them,” I declared.

“Finally,” Benjamin huffed with a malicious smile. “Institutional courage with snacks.”

CHAPTER 18

Avery

By the time I got home that night, I had become very calm in the way of people right before they do something incredibly stupid.

Callum had wanted me to go home with security, which sounded dramatic until Benjamin appeared at his office door with a grim little alphabetical list of reasons it was not dramatic enough. Dana had agreed with him, which should have settled the matter because Dana agreed with no one unless the alternative was legally or structurally unsound. Tom from legal had hovered in the background, pale and fluttery, looking like he had personally invented liability and regretted giving it so many opportunities. In the end, I had left Rowe Tower in a company car with a driver Callum trusted, a security escort that stayed discreet enough to be humiliating, and the knowledge that somewhere in the city, strangers had pictures of me I had not consented to being taken.

Pictures of us. Against the window. Us in Callum’s office. Us after hours, after the world had narrowed to his hands and mybreath and the kind of hunger that had felt private because I thought it had been private. Foolishly private. Glass-walled-office private, which was to say not private at all if someone had a drone and the moral compass of a sewer rat.

When the driver pulled up outside my building, I just sat there for a long second, caught up in my head.

The driver glanced at me through the rearview mirror. “Would you like me to walk you in, Ms. Hale?”

“No!” My voice came out too quickly, too loudly. I softened it because none of this was his fault. “No, thank you. I’m okay.”

He did not look convinced, but he did not argue. Callum had probably chosen him for that exact quality: obedience without commentary. I got out, walked myself into the building, climbed the stairs, unlocked my apartment, locked the door behind me, then stood in the tiny entry with my purse still over my shoulder and my coat still buttoned.

Looking around in a daze, I suddenly rushed to the front window and pulled the drapes shut so violently I feared I had yanked them right off the wall. Then I laughed. I started shaking like my nervous system had waited until I was alone before knocking every glass off every shelf. I dropped my purse. It hit the floor and spilled lipstick, keys, a receipt, and Ben’s business card like evidence of a life that had been pretending to be organized. I sank down beside it, back against the wall, knees drawn up, coat bunching around my thighs, and pressed both hands over my mouth.

They had pictures.

They had watched me.