Julia Merchant lifted her phone from the bedside table and scrolled through the dozens of private Facebook messages she had received. Most of them were texting acronyms and emoticons expressing her friends’ shock and disbelief about what was happening. The senders, she realized, had beaten her to the morning papers.
She reached for her laptop on the floor beside her bed and went from website to website reading the stories about her father, her mother, and Baiba Lielkaja. She stopped when she got to the Daily News headline. This one, she knew, would enrage her father. She stared at the side-by-side photos of him and Brandon Johnson. Her father would not be amused by the juxtaposition.
She closed the laptop and returned it to the floor, thinking of her father’s words on the phone yesterday. Do you have any idea what my life will be like when the press gets their hands on this? She imagined him now, sitting in his executive suite. He always got to his office by seven AM, so he would have read the articles hours ago in the backseat of the Escalade while Felipe drove. For a split second, she felt sorry for him. He was alone and under siege. And she had the impulse to pick up the phone and say something kind. But what? I believe in you? I know you didn’t do this? I’m sorry I started all this? But she wasn’t sorry. He deserved whatever embarrassment and discomfort he was feeling right now. He had earned it so many times in the past. He undoubtedly assumed she did not remember that past or that her memories of it were so impressionistic that she could not grasp their significance. Otherwise, how could he look her in the eyes now? But she remembered all too well.
She pulled the fluffy duvet up to her chin and pressed her head into her soft down pillow. She thought of him offering to pay for her to see a therapist—maybe she should take him up on his offer. She could talk out the disturbing memories, exorcize them from her brain, and move on with her life. But wasn’t it too late for that? Wasn’t the damage done?
She pulled the covers right over her head. She did not want to get out of bed. Maybe she would stay right here until Detective Codella made an arrest and this was all over.