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“I can’t. This is more than my job is worth, Roberts. If she had any idea that I’d known about you two and was keeping it from her, then that’s my career ending as well as yours.”
He sighed and reached for clean jeans, hurriedly pulling them on. “Is it really that bad?”
“Yeah, it’s that bad.”
“Why?” Chris asked. “I fell in love with him—I can’t help that. Why is that so bad that it risks losing your job as well as mine.”
“Because you’ve betrayed her trust. And if she knew that I’d kept your secret, I would be betraying her trust, too. After Reiss, she has zero tolerance with that kind of thing.”
Chris tugged on a shirt. “Reiss again?”
Natalie looked at the floor. “Chris…”
“Tell me what he did, Natalie.”
“I can’t…”
“Nat, if I’m being punished for somebody else’s sins, I have the right to know what they are!”
She took a deep breath and slowly raised her eyes to meet his. “The only people who know the full story are me, Foster, President Barratt, and Jamie himself.”
Chris said nothing, standing still beside the bed.
Natalie bit her lip. “When Jamie came back from Afghanistan, he was a wreck. He was under mild sedation for most of the time in the hospital, doped up on painkillers while the bones in his feet mended. He was miserable, he was scared—it was awful to watch. Reiss was assigned to him when he got out. Everyone thought he was a good choice—he was solid, dependable, friendly, encouraging. He was just what Jamie needed to drag him out of his shell. Except that when Jamie got out of the hospital, he launched himself straight into society—parties and alcohol, sleeping with wildly inappropriate people…drugs. Before Jamie was readmitted, he was found in a club bathroom with a needle in his arm, half dead from a heroin overdose.”
“Fuck…” Chris breathed in horror. “How did that happen? Was Reiss even watching him?”
“It was Reiss who did it,” Natalie replied.
Chris’s blood ran cold. “What?”
Natalie shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “What we didn’t know until later, was that Reiss was being paid all along by somebody else. He’d been instructed to take Jamie to parties, to encourage the drinking, the drugs—basically he was told to destroy him.”
Something in Chris’s brain clicked into place—the night of Jamie’s panic attack at the Met, the man, the comment that sparked it off…
“It was Geoffrey Pierce, wasn’t it?”
Natalie nodded. “We traced the bank records—Reiss had been in Pierce’s employ from the start. The only true way to bring down the president is by bringing down her son. He was already in a vulnerable state—it didn’t take much for Reiss to find a loose thread and unravel it.”
Chris felt sick. All this time, he’d been led to believe that Reiss had made an honest mistake and had been punished severely for it. But now he was discovering that Reiss had actively tried to kill Jamie…
“Did he do anything else?” Chris asked haltingly. “I mean, did he ever physically hurt him or…?”
Nat blinked at him, and Chris really hoped that she would understand what he was trying to ask. She did.
“We don’t know,” she murmured. “Jamie couldn’t be certain. He said that he kept waking up in various states of undress, or with bruises, and couldn’t remember how he got that way. It’s like whatever drugs he was taking at the time fogged up his memory, confused him. He said he couldn’t remember what was real and what wasn’t, or if he took off his own clothes, or—”
“That’s why you didn’t let me get him undressed the other night, isn’t it? You didn’t want him waking up without a memory of how it happened—didn’t want it to trigger anything.”
Natalie nodded again.
Chris ran both of his hands over his face. “Why didn’t anybody think to tell me?”
“It was a unanimous decision,” Natalie replied. “Everybody agreed to keep it quiet. Especially Jamie. He was supposed to be the only person who would be able to tell anybody else.”
“He was going to tell me,” Chris said, thinking back to the night after the Met once again. “He said he’d tell me about what Pierce had done to cause his panic attack, but he just…wasn’t ready yet.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. Now he understood everything—why Jamie had been so adamant to keep their relationship secret until the right time, why he had been so nervous around Pierce, why he had questioned Chris’s motives.
