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Monica looked down as if Joanna told her she had a stain on her clothes. Her face lit with understanding when she remembered the piece of paper shoved in her bra. She dug down her dress, rooting around like she was adjusting her underwire, and pulled it out. “What is this?”
Lucy recognized it immediately. She snatched it from Monica’s hand and unfolded it.
“Proof,” Joanna said.
The dollar amount Jonathan tried to buy her silence with stared her in the face, unmistakably in his handwriting and on his personal letterhead.
“You kept it,” Lucy said. A smile lifted her face, out of surprise, gratitude, and, most of all, hope. In that moment, she was immensely thankful she hadn’t torn it to shreds as soon as he handed it to her that morning.
“I don’t understand.” Monica frowned. “What am I looking at?”
Joanna drained her glass with a determined gulp. “That is the bribe Jonathan passed to Lucy this morning when he tried to fire her and then pay her to keep quiet. She brought it to me after the fact, and I thought holding on to it might work in our favor. Turns out, yes. See, when I confronted him about what Lucy told me, he denied it. I know Lucy would never lie to me, and I told him as much. I didn’t tell him I had proof of his offer though. You’ll see that number is written on his personal letterhead, which he commissioned from a stationery firm in Brentwood for an obscene price. I know my brother, and I know he doesn’t let that ridiculous paper out of his sight. There is no denying he wrote it. I gave him a final chance to confess, and he didn’t, so here we are.”
Lucy’s mouth burned with oaky scotch and her head still swam from the revelation, but the pieces came together with a sharp snap that made her smile again.
“And we’re going to share it as proof that everything he just said during the press conference was a lie.”
“Indeed.” Joanna smiled. She uncorked the bottle for another pour. “I have to say, Lucy, I’m glad you didn’t include it as evidence in the article. He would have discredited it along with everything else.”
The oversight struck her as wildly fortunate. “I didn’t even think of it, but I’m glad you did.”
Joanna tipped the bottle toward her like a toast.
“What’s going to stop him from discrediting it now?” Monica asked. She braved another sip of the scotch, perhaps embracing the moment.
“Nothing,” Joanna said. “But it’s going to look pretty bad for him when it goes public, seeing that he just lied about it on live TV.”
Lucy had to agree, the sequence of events would not work in Jonathan’s favor. She marveled at Joanna’s ability to think one step ahead. A good publicist always had at least one backup plan, and sometimes those backup plans were forward plans.
A startling thought struck her like a smack in the face.
“It was you,” she said, stunned. “You told Jonathan about the article before it was published.”
Joanna hummed with a knowing smile. “Like I said, I know my brother. If he knew it was coming, I knew he’d try to nip it in the bud and, in doing so, expose himself as a liar. I’m really sorry for everything he said. I had a moment of hope that decency would get the best of him and he’d come clean, but my faith was misplaced.”
Lucy shook her head in disbelief, smiling, but at the same time realized she had made a terrible mistake. “It wasn’t Chase.”
“Sorry?” Joanna asked.
Lucy pressed her hand to her forehead, feeling remorseful. Chase may not have been there when she needed him, but at least he hadn’t actively sabotaged her. Not this time anyway. “I thought Chase warned Jonathan about the article so he’d have the chance to defend himself with the press conference. He was one of the only other people who knew about it; I asked him to back the piece, but he said it was too risky. I accused him of helping Jonathan.”
Joanna pursed her lips in consideration, and Lucy noted how she didn’t needlessly apologize for the misunderstanding she had nothing to do with. “I know you and Chase have your differences, but perhaps your faith isn’t as misplaced as you thought. What you did was incredibly brave, Lucy—and a huge personal risk. Some people might just need time to catch up. He may still surprise you.”
Lucy sat with the odd emotion of owing someone she was mad at an apology.
“So now what happens?” Monica asked.
“Now,” Joanna said, “you write a follow-up piece with the offer as evidence and post it on every channel you can. I will call an emergency board meeting for later to discuss Jonathan’s replacement and a company briefing for now to reassure everyone things are okay. You’re right, Lucy: I should be in charge. And if staging a coup is the way I have to get what’s rightfully mine, then so be it.”
Lucy admired the woman a whole hell of a lot already, but never more than she did in that moment.
“And what do I do?” Lucy asked.
“After the briefing, take the rest of the day off. You’ve been through hell.”
She couldn’t argue the latter point, but she needed to contact all her clients given that they’d surely heard the news by then. Some of them were probably wondering if she’d been fired and if they were still represented.
But then she could take the day off. Maybe she’d go home and take a bubble bath before her party.
