Page 61 of Total Jane Wreck

Chapter Twenty-Five

Jane, I am not a gentle-tempered man…put your finger on my pulse, feel how it throbs, and—beware!

I text Brontë: “Need to talk. When’s a good time to call?”

“Very busy at work today,” she responds. “How about four your time?”

I reply with a thumbs-up.

Chet stays holed up inside for the afternoon, presumably talking with his lawyer. It’s Axel Rose’s day off, so I’m extra busy with the horses. As soon as four o’clock rolls around, I call Brontë. She picks up on the first ring.

“What’s up?”

I tell her everything—how Chet was evasive when I asked him about Birdy and Mason. How he kissed the bejeezus out of me. How I wound up in his bed last night, despite me being determined to have alone time.

“Then the storm hit, and we’re lying there in the dark. Something still felt off, and I was bracing for the speech. You know the one.”

“The ‘I’m too broken for you’ speech?”

“Exactly. Except, instead he asked me to move in. To stop being his employee and become his partner. Said we’ll run the ranch together.” I pause. “He used the word love.”

Brontë is quiet for a beat. “Jane, that’s great.”

“Yeah,” I say. “At the time, when he said all that, I was so happy. But . . .”

“But, what’s wrong?” Brontë asks.

I press my back against the fence post and look out at the split oak, its raw wound still pale against the bark. “This morning I walked past his study, and he was on the phone with his lawyer. He sounded—cornered. Something about keeping Mason from suing him.” I watch Miss Adele pick her way around the fallen half of the tree. “And then, I went for a walk and found that a lightning bolt had split the big oak out by the pasture completely in two.”

“Yikes.”

“Right? When I saw it, I just had this bone-deep sense that it was a portent of something bad.” I suck in a breath. “What do you think?”

There’s a pause.

“Okay, I love you,” Brontë says, which is always how she opens when she’s about to say something I won’t love. “And I need you to not get mad.”

“I won’t get mad.”

“You might.”

“Brontë . . .”

She exhales. “He’s keeping something from you. That’s just a fact. And the boss thing—I mean, is he going to stop paying you a salary and just . . . cover your expenses instead? Because you left Kentucky specifically to stop getting taken care of.”

Now, Miss Adele is sniffing the ruined tree, inspecting it as best as she knows how.

“Also,” Brontë continues, “there’s something going on with Birdy. People on Instagram are asking questions. Real questions.” She pauses. “Some of their theories are pretty out there, which is why I didn’t mention it before. I don’t want you worrying about crackpot theories. But after you told me about seeing a face in the barn window, I went back and reread some of the more rational-sounding posts. You should look at them before moving in with this man.”

Miss Adele lifts her head and looks at me. Our gazes lock.

“Send me the links,” I say.

Each post is more unsettling than the last. Fans have split into two camps: #Birdysfaking, she’s pretending to have cancer, and #freeBirdyBanks, she’s being held hostage, probably by Chet. A smaller group thinks both are true.

In hundreds of comment threads, sleuths pore over her social feed—backgrounds, timestamps, window reflections. They note her “cancer journey” mirrors a known lymphoma blogger’s and argue her chemo selfies could be staged at a wellness spa, or that she might sneak into a hospital wing or purposefully get dehydrated in order to be admitted.

But why fake cancer if she’s wealthy and backed by a billionaire ex? That fuels the hostage theory: her “at-home” posts all show the same nondescript room, and the mountain-shaped shadows match those at Resilience Ranch. A forensic analyst even claims her speech is coded pleas for help.