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“Don’t go anywhere,” Daria said before Reese could say a word.
“What’s going on?” she asked, then downed half her lemon water.
“You haven’t seen it, have you?”
“Seen what? I was in bed by nine o’clock last night, and I just got up.” Panic gripped her. Who’d died? Her first thought was of her grandmother. Why else would her mother call? “Has something happened? Has someone passed away?”
“No, nothing like that. It’s different, but it’s bad.”
Reese sat at one of the white bistro chairs at her kitchen island. She needed for Daria to get to the point.
“Daria, tell me right now what is going on.”
“Do you remember someone named Jennifer Brennan?”
The name was like a gut punch, and it took Reese a moment to catch her breath. Reese would never forget Jennifer Brennan. That woman—or girl at the time—had made Reese’s life a nightmare.
“What about her?” Reese asked slowly.
“She’s gone to news shows, gossip rags, and trash TV to say that you’re a horrible person. She has texts and emails. It’s a bunch of stuff about you saying that you wished she was dead and some other stuff about you making fun of her being adopted. Does this ring a bell?”
Reese clapped a hand over her mouth. Maybe she had said some of those things, but Jennifer had said and done so much worse. And if Reese had retaliated, it was because she’d been at the end of the rope. Suddenly, the lemon water wanted to make a reappearance.
“I haven’t seen or heard from Jennifer in nearly ten years! All this happened when we were kids.”
“Well, the press doesn’t care, and they ;re having a field day. I’d avoid social media if I were you.”
Reese closed her eyes and tried to think, but the only thing that kept coming back to her was that this was just like a death: it was the death of everything she had built.
ChapterTwo
“We can’t keep quiet about this. We have to issue a statement.”
Reese massaged her temples. Her agent, her publicist, and Daria surrounded her at her kitchen island. For the last two hours they’d been trying to make sense of this, trying to figure out a way to find anything positive, but it wasn’t looking good.
“I don’t know what to tell you. She kept things from when we were fifteen years old. I didn’t keep that kind of stuff. Why would I? And if you think what I said and did was bad, you won’t believe the kinds of things she said and did to me.”
Marnie, Reese’s long-time publicist, rubbed her arm. Marnie had been around from the days when Reese’s parents controlled her career. And in a role reversal, it had always been Marnie who’d been consoling, sympathetic, and encouraging, while Fran Beresford had been cold and uncaring. Reese had been a business and discussion piece for Fran and nothing more. Marnie had been the maternal one, watching out for Reese and her partner Cam. She’d found their agent, John Gilmour, and then she’d hired Daria to handle the day-to-day skating business. Daria had been Reese’s assistant ever since. Reese wasn’t as close to Marnie as she’d once been, now that John had given Marnie new responsibilities with other clients, but she was still someone Reese trusted.
“Are you sure you didn’t keep emails on an old phone or computer? Is it possible you deleted the old email address, and we can find it on a server somewhere? Or maybe she wrote you notes?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But Cam would remember all this. He knew what a terror Jennifer was to me.”
“We’ll talk to Cam. Anyone else who would remember anything?”
Reese racked her brain. “Sure, there’d be a few others we skated with. Jennifer had her crew, and anyone who wasn’t in it was a target.”
John took his turn to speak. “Why do you think she’s doing this now?”
“Because I’m successful and she’s not,” Reese said bluntly. “We’re about to launch our new plus-size athletic line, and people are buzzing about it. Maybe that’s pissed her off. This is a woman who never wanted me to be successful. Do you know how many times she cut my laces or poured shaving cream in my skates?”Or called me ugly? Made fun of my clothes and hair? Laughed at my mistakes?
She didn’t say that part out loud.
“I guess the question that I need to ask is if you actually said all those things,” John said. “Because if you did, we need to get ahead of this, and fast.”
Reese lowered her head and her shoulders sagged. “Yeah, I said all those things. I’m not proud of myself. I wasn’t proud of myself then, but she was angry, and I was a fifteen-year-old under so much pressure.”
Marnie and Daria smiled sympathetically, but John remained stone-faced.
