Page 60 of State of Ruin

“There’s my girl,” he says, as he always does. This, right here, is love. Showing up for someone, every single day, even when it’s dark and cold and you should be tucked up in your bed. Supporting them. Celebrating them.

Not sidelining them and overruling them and gaslighting them. Not thinking that it’s okay to secretly operate them like they’re a puppet.

I lean in for a hug and wrap my arms tightly around him. He smells faintly of oil and laundry detergent. “Hey, Dad.”

“You okay, sweetie?” He pats me through my thick puffer coat.

“Yeah. Just tired. Long day.”

The longest.

I get into bed as quietly as I can so as not to wake Sylvie. I’m dead tired, but my brain is running in high gear. I lie here on my back, staring up at the darkness, and I try to process the events of this morning. It feels like weeks ago. Today really is the longest day ever.

I don’t know what to do with these emotions raging and whirling inside my body, so intense they’re like a physical pain. I’m so freaking angry with Sinclair for being exactly what I thought he was before I ever knew him: a rich, entitled asshole. And, furious though I am at what he so casually took from me and my family, without a second thought, I might actually be more furious that he hid it so well.

He put on such a fantastic performance. Honestly, A-plus. He totally had me fooled. He made me fall for a guy who didn’t actually exist, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that kind of grief. He’s still out there, and we could still be together right now, but he’s made it impossible. He took this beautiful thing we had, and he was so careless with it that he shattered it. And all this time—God, all this time—he’s been sitting with that act of betrayal, acting all adoring and worshipful, whisking me off to his family’s iconic freaking estate and to the ballet, knowing that poor, stupid, clueless Elyse was lapping it all up.

Lapping is a good word, because it reminds me of lapdog. That’s what I’ve been, these past few weeks, a cute, silly little lapdog, sitting on his knee and allowing him to pet me and feed me treats and spending not one moment wondering if I should be second-guessing any of it.

If I should be second-guessing him.

Jeez, I feel so stupid!

And that’s when the tears come for real. Because finally, I’m alone in the darkness and I don’t have to put on a brave face in front of lovely friends like Olivia or Katrin, or well-meaning strangers like Vanessa, or the man who’s the evil mastermind behind all of this. God, Taylor Swift would have so much to say about all of this. Sinclair Voss would be rich creative territory for her, and I’m pretty sure she’d write him his own version of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”

But what’s the point? Taylor was right.

Guys like Sinclair never do time for their crimes.

I lie here and screw my eyes tightly shut, but the tears are leaking out everywhere, over my nose and down my temples, soaking my pillow. I make fists with my hands and press them against my eyes, huffing out my pain and frustration in a giant, wet, shuddery sigh, and that’s when my sister’s voice comes to me through the darkness.

“Lees? What’s wrong, hon?”

“I cannot fucking believe this guy,” she spits when I’ve finished my tale of woe, NDA be damned. My sister is a vault. “He swindled you out of your Times Square moment, just like that? What the ever-loving fuck is wrong with him? I swear to God, I want to take him out with my wheelchair. I would go so fucking fast.”

I’ve never loved my sister more. There is no brand of righteous indignation better than that of a sister who’s been scorned by proxy. I will take to my grave the fact that he paid me for those first “sessions”—his favorite word. Sylvie will never know the truth behind the surprise royalty payments that paid down some of our PT debt. Still, she is even more furious than I dare to be. She’s seen the Page Six article—now, thankfully, replaced on the front page by a photo of the British royals—and we’re lying in our twin beds in the darkness, holding hands across the small gap that separates them.

This is what you lean into when people let you down: a hug from your dad and a handhold from your sister. Tomorrow there will be more of the same, including a chat with Dad about what’s gone down when I have the energy—sex work carefully edited out—and cuddles from my beautiful little niece. None of it will have that same, falling-off-a-cliff feeling that lying nestled in Sinclair’s arms does, but it will all be real and true and constant, and I’ll be able to trust all of it, and that is what counts.

“I would pay a lot of money to watch you take him out with your chair,” I say now.

“Right? You could make him stand on the sidewalk in front of the house, and then you could push me down the ramp so I build up speed quickly.” We have a ramp over our front steps so Sylvie can get in and out of the house easily.

“You’d be like the Terminator.”

“Shit.” She blows out a breath. “I can’t believe you’ve been dating Sinclair freaking Voss.”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you.”

“You think? And now I can’t even ask you about the good parts because we hate him. There were good parts, though, right?”

I’m quiet for a moment. “Every single part was good, right up until I found out he’d vetoed that job.”

“Oh, hon. God, I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Yeah. And now I feel like I can’t trust my memories, because all the time he was being so lovely, he’d already axed me behind the scenes and I never knew. How can someone do that and look themselves in the mirror?”

“He’s a Voss,” she says simply. “It’s probably in the family playbook. They probably sign, like, blood oaths when they turn twelve. It’s like a very WASPy Mafia.”