Page 161 of His Good Girl

It should have been too soon. Too complicated. Too stupid. Love was a word that should have required more than two weeks, more than stolen office moments and crisis rooms and the strange, impossible feeling of being seen by someone who could ruin me and kept choosing not to. But in my heart, sitting there next to Jules in that moment, I realized one thing.

I did love him.

“Yes,” I said.

Jules closed her eyes. “God.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean God help anyone who tries to take that from you.”

I looked at her. The guilt and the fear were still written all over her face, but I could see a sense of determination flashing in her eyes. Jules was not Dana. She was not Benjamin. She did not have a tablet, a legal pad, or a terrifying understanding of municipal politics, but she had always been dangerous in smaller, more intimate ways.

“Show me,” I said.

She hesitated. “Avery?—”

“Show me.”

She pulled out her phone with trembling hands and for the next hour, we sat on my couch scrolling through the messages she had not deleted because some survival instinct in her had been smarter than her fear. The woman who contacted her had called herself Becca. There was no last name, of course. There was a number that probably went nowhere useful, an email address that looked professional enough to be fake, and messages phrased with the same bloodless menace Grant Vale had apparently brought into Callum’s conference room.

“They asked about the dinner three times,” I said, scrolling.

“Yes.”

“And my apartment.”

“Yes.”

“And when Callum picked me up.”

“Yes.”

“And whether I trusted him.”

Jules swallowed. “I didn’t answer that one.”

I looked at her.

“I said, ‘More than she trusts most people,’ then deleted it before sending.” She pointed to the unsent draft screenshot she had taken in some fit of paranoia. “I didn’t answer.”

My chest hurt.

“Thank you,” I murmured.

She cried again, silently this time. Then I saw one message that made my stomach tighten.

“They asked about Hartwell?” I asked.

Jules nodded. “I said you didn’t know anything about Hartwell.”

“Good.”

“I didn’t tell them work things. I wouldn’t.”

I believed her.

“They still think they have you,” I said, the first glimmers of an idea coming to me.