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I finished my glass of wine. What really worried me was the people who weren’t posting. My WhatsApp groups were silent. Other than Georgia’s gloat-text, my phone was quiet. There were no calls or concerned messages. The women I knew, our wider circle, they weren’t posting online, but there was no way they weren’t talking about this. Of course they were. Right at that moment, private groups were being set up, excluding me. Oh, they would couch my exclusion in sensitivity or politeness. Poor Jamie, they would say. She must be so worried right now. I don’t want to bother her. I’m sure she needs a break from thinking about this. What they really wanted, of course, was the freedom to say anything and everything. To speculate about Simon and Nina and me and Rory and our lives and our parenting and exactly what had happened at our house in Stowe.
I put my tablet away and poured another glass of wine and took it to my bathtub. I sat there and worried until the water cooled. I was dressed again by the time Simon came home. I said nothing to him about the press conference and I didn’t ask him any questions. I just offered him something to eat and plastered on a fake smile, and he retreated to his bedroom as soon as he could. I went to the living room with yet another glass of wine and turned on the television. I can’t remember what was on. Reality TV, I think. A Survivor rerun, maybe. Simon used to love that show when he was a kid. It was one of the only shows we watched together. He loved the drama of the plotting and the planning and the blindsiding. I stared at the show mindlessly and worried. I was sure that when Rory came home, he’d have spoken to our attorney in detail, and he’d be confident that everything was going to be fine. And maybe he would have been right if this had been happening twenty years ago, but these days everything is trial by internet. If this story got national attention (and I thought it would, if only because Nina was so goddamn photogenic), then Simon’s future, and ours, was going to be decided on Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube. Opening arguments were already being made in the court of public opinion and there were no attorneys involved.
Rory got home late. I was half asleep on the couch when I heard the front door open and shut. I went to the kitchen, poured two glasses of wine, and then went to find him. He was in his study, hunched over his computer. I stood in the doorway.
“Baby,” I said. He jumped a little and turned in his seat like I’d caught him watching porn. Maybe I had. I kept my eyes off his screen.
“Can I talk to you?”
He gave me his focused look. His you’ve-got-my-attention look. “Something on your mind?”
I sat in the chair opposite his desk. “I’m worried, Rory. People are talking online. They’re going after Simon. Leanne Fraser said something really stupid at their press conference today, something about searching our land. She basically said she thought Simon was lying. So now people are just jumping to wild conclusions.”
“I saw it.”
I took a breath, kept my voice soft and low, just the way he likes it. “I’m worried because this stuff has a way of getting out of control. There are people out there who love a story like this. They want to be part of it. They’re going to pore over Simon’s social media and Nina’s too, and they’re going to be looking for clues to this or that or whatever they want to believe, and they’re going to find them and blow them up and analyze it all to death.”
Rory was looking at me with a weird half smile on his face.
“Maybe I’m overreacting,” I said. “Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, but I—”
“You’re not overreacting.” He studied me for a moment, like he was debating whether or not to confide in me, then he pushed his chair back and gestured to his computer screen. “I agree with your analysis. If anything, I think the situation is worse than you’ve said. There’s already been enormous interest in the story. The press conference video has been shared twenty-eight thousand times so far across all major platforms. I’m told by people who know about these things that that’s likely to increase exponentially over the next few days.”
The number horrified me.
“Who told you that?”
“Alistair referred me to a PR firm. I guess you’d call them pretty niche. They specialize in reputation management. They work for politicians and celebrities, but also companies that have a reputation to protect. I had a meeting with them this afternoon. They’d already started tracking everything.”
I bit the corner of my thumbnail until it cracked.
“These guys said that you can’t stop this kind of thing when it starts. It’s like playing Whac-A-Mole. They said the only real option is to flood the field with moles of our own.”
Rory turned his computer screen so that I could see it. I leaned forward. He was logged into YouTube, into a channel called Justice for Simon. There were two video posts up on the channel so far. One from the press conference, a video of Leanne Fraser talking about her daughter, but this video had new audio, one of those voice overlays like the one teenagers use on TikTok videos.
Why does Leanne Fraser sound like a robot when she talks about loving her daughter? What’s up with her body language?
The second video was a bunch of photographs and video of Simon and Nina, culled from their social media and edited together. In the photos they were smiling, laughing with friends, kissing. In one of them, Nina, dressed in a bikini, pushed Simon into the pool and then laughed into the camera. She looked beautiful. They both did. A young couple in love. But the video ended with a still from the press conference. A close up of Leanne’s face, twisted and distorted in the midst of some painful expression. Her hair looked greasy, her face gray. And across the screen, written in bloodred letters, were the words:
Why did Nina run away from home? What aren’t they telling us?
“What is this?” I asked.
Rory’s eyes were still on the screen. “The PR firm got these to me within an hour of our meeting. They set up the channel and posted the videos, and they’re using bots to amplify them. The theory is that the noise over this kind of thing will confuse the narrative. People will be less likely to paint Simon as the bad guy because things won’t be clear cut.”
I shook my head. I’d been worried that Rory wouldn’t get it, I’d wanted him to take the situation seriously, but I didn’t know what to do with what was in front of me.
He looked up and his eyes met mine. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.” I tried to read him. He looked so sure of himself. “This is just... it’s a lot.”
“I had to do something, Jamie. You saw the press conference. You saw yourself what it was going to do. It was a dog whistle to every true crime fanatic out there. If I hadn’t done something, Simon would have been convicted in everyone’s minds before the week was over. This is our son. We can’t just sit and wait while everything happens around us. We have to take action.”
“Yes.” I couldn’t argue with him. He was just repeating back what I’d said to him, in different words. “But what are we trying to say with this? We don’t think Leanne... I mean, this is clearly suggesting that she...” I let my voice trail off, and I gestured at the screen.
His hand reached out and gripped mine. It made me jump. I tried to cover that up. I softened my hand and allowed him to hold me, but maybe he was more perceptive than usual. He squeezed my hand briefly, then released it.
“No, I don’t think Leanne is responsible for Nina disappearing, but she created the problem. She pointed her finger straight at Simon at that press conference. We can’t just stand back and let her do that. We need to get ahead of things, to remind people that there are other people in Nina’s life. And my guys aren’t going to paint a target on Leanne. They’re going to blast a range of different theories and possibilities into the online world. Sow as much confusion as possible. Think of it as noise. The more noise, the better. But we have to do this, and we have to do it now. My PR firm tells me this story is already getting national traction. It’s because of the photos and video. Nina and Simon look good on camera, and there’s so much footage of them that the networks are going to have a field day. Every day that girl stays away from home, this story gets bigger. As things stand, even if she came home next week, there’d always be a cloud over Simon. Every time someone googles his name, years from now, this story will come up and all the rumors with it. And what if she doesn’t come home, Jamie?”
