Page 71 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

“I have. The first one you gave me after Sophia's presentation, when you needed me to believe you were fine. Downsizing. Clean exit. The version you give someone who's just offered you a job.” My thumbs press into the knot at her left shoulder and she breathes out. “The second one came out two nights ago when you were angry enough to stop choosing your words. That one was closer. But it was still sideways.”

She's quiet.

My hands keep moving.

“Just us,” I say. “Nothing you say leaves this room.”

Another long pause. Then she tells me.

She talks to the middle distance, her head tipped slightly forward, my hands moving slowly across her shoulders while the words come out of her in the order they actually happened rather than the order she's learned to package them in.

The years of managed distance she'd built between herself and Jason and Rebecca Miller. The calls she stopped returning. The money requests she'd stopped answering and the guilt that came with stopping, which she'd eventually learned to put down because guilt was the currency they'd always traded in and she couldn't afford to keep spending it.

The way they found her anyway. Her apartment address first, then her office. Her father in the lobby of her employer's building telling security he needed to speak to someone about financial irregularities involving his daughter. Her mother in the reception area, crying, doing the thing she'd always done with tears, which was use them as a tool precisely and without shame.

“Seven days,” she says. “From the first incident to my last day. I had four years of performance reviews that said I was exceptional. Seven days.”

I press my lips to her hair. I don't speak.

“And they'd done it before,” she continues. Her voice is level in the way that things are level when someone has worked very hard to make them that way. “To a friend of mine. Three years ago. I didn't know until after I'd left New York. Which means they've been doing this and I was walking around thinking I'd gotten far enough away.” She exhales. “I hadn't gotten anywhere. They were just waiting until I had something worth the effort.”

The office is very quiet.

I hold her and let the quiet sit because she's earned it and because what I want to say needs a moment before I say it or it's going to come out harder than it should.

“There's something you need to know,” I say.

I feel the shift in her body before I finish telling her. The way her shoulders draw in slightly, the change in her breathing from slow to careful.

I tell her about Maddox's real itinerary. New York before Milan. The security firm, my stake in it, the call I made the morning after her office while she was still asleep down the hall. The preliminary file Marcus had sent through. The pattern, confirmed. The options they were looking at.

She's quiet for a long beat after I finish.

Then she straightens away from my chest.

“You three are looking into my parents,” she says. “Without telling me.”

“Yes.”

She moves to stand and I let her. She walks to the window and stands with her arms crossed, her back to me, looking out at the vineyard.

“That's my situation,” she says. “My family. You don't make decisions about it without asking me first.”

“I know.”

“Then why⁠—”

“Because you described a pattern and patterns don't stop on their own,” I say. “Because I wasn't going to wait for them to locate you here before I understood who we were dealing with. Because the morning after you told us, none of us were capable of sitting on that information and doing nothing.” I pause.

She turns from the window. The expression on her face is the one she gets when she wants to be angrier than the argument is allowing her to be.

“You should have told me.”

“You're right, but I’d⁠—”

“Don't agree with me and then say you'd do it again in the same breath.”

“Both things are true. We should have told you and I'd do it again. I'm not going to pretend one cancels the other.”