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Piper wished she could cry as she had in Ethan’s arms on the boat. It had been cathartic.
He said it was adrenaline.
But for her, it felt like another Tuesday. Her stress had been building up for a long time.
Damn, her shoulder hurt.
As she reached up to massage her muscles, Piper heard the door snick open, and her stomach clenched.
“It’s me,” Chanti called. “I’m back with ice cream.”
Piper’s phone, propped on the sink, showed that it had indeed been a half hour.
The bathwater was cooling, yet Piper had no idea how time had passed so quickly.
Ice cream was good medicine, and it motivated her up and out, reaching for a towel.
A few minutes later, dried and back in her flannel pajamas, Piper sat at one end of her couch in her living room, and Chanti sat on the other.
Chanti had been talking about connecting with a whistleblower support group about getting a lawyer involved, and that meant she’d found something worth blaring out to the public.
Life was about to change.
“Okay,” Piper said. “Ready.” She wasn’t.
“You’re not,” Chanti said. “There’s nothing that’s going to prepare you for what I’m going to say. I have a game plan.”
“Shit.”
“You are not alone. You are loved,” Chanti said.
Piper’s stomach dropped.
“Know that you don’t have to process what I’m saying now. There are months and years to do that.”
“Years?” Piper’s voice caught in her throat.
“And therapists. You’ll need therapists, for sure. So, knowing that, take the pressure off yourself to reach emotional conclusions today. You don’t have to make sense of everything. But I do have to tell you enough so you have your footing while you get ready to talk to the lawyer and then tell the world.” Chanti took a bite of ice cream and swallowed it down. “How much do you know about Lionel and your dad and mom?”
Piper scowled.
“Your dad kept a log—a diary, if you will. It has decades of daily entries, so I had my computer program summarize it for me, then I went back to fact-check the passages.”
Piper’s lips pressed tightly.
Something about the Alabaster arrangement had always felt off, and her dad had glossed over her questions and distracted her with other topics when she’d asked.
“I’m going to start smaller,” Chanti said, resting her pint of butter pecan on her stomach. “I’ll start with some bad news, good news.”
Piper braced.
“At the beginning of this project, your dad told Lionel that it was going to take years—decades to get the formula right. But if things went the way he thought—”
Piper held up her hands to ward off the next words, but Chanti kept going.
“Pulling off this first bandage, it’s better that I rip it off quick. Your dad told Lionel that this formula could well be the fountain of youth. And that when it was ready for the FDA, it would be safe to use. ‘Think of what that would mean to Alabaster,’ he wrote.”
Piper held her breath.
