Fuckity fuck fuck. I really wanted access to this catering gig to last a few weeks longer.
As soon as I’m around the corner of the house, I kick it into high gear and sprint through the side gate. I’m not sure I can outrun Jason, even if I’m wearing clothes more suited to a foot race than he is.
He looked good in that suit.
Truly, absolutely not what I should be concerned with right now.
I can’t risk trying to cut across properties in this neighborhood. Too much money, too many connections. Guaranteed security systems that police would actually respond to alarms from. My bike is three blocks away, because there wasn’t enough parking at the hoity-toity residence for guests and the hired help.
Can Jason find me in three blocks? Jesus Christ, why did I not grin and bear the discomfort of tracking him while I’m in town? Being caught off-guard like this is completely disruptive to—well, everything. Did I not think I might run into him?
I knew I could at some point, but tonight? The chances were low. When I worked for him, the socialites were always someone else’s job.
I could have handled running into Cole or Tag. I would love to see Wilson again. But Jason? I repeat, fuckity fuck fuck.
I need to get to the next block, then make a decision.
Left or right.
I risk a glance behind me, and I don’t see him. I don’t hear his footsteps, either, but those could come any second.
Which block is shorter?
Left.
The sticky summer humidity isn’t making this fun. My kingdom for a breeze, holy shit. A car’s engine growls to life a block away, and my pulse jacks up again. I force my breath out as steadily as possible while sprinting at top speed.
I get around the block and the tucked-away parking lot is in sight. I sprint the whole way, ignoring my protesting lungs, and don’t stop until I’m on my bike and roaring towards Georgetown.
It’s not that I’m afraid of Jason, exactly. I’m not afraid of anyone. But I don’t have time to deal with the mistakes of the past right now. I have enough on my plate with the mistakes of the present.
It doesn’t take me long to get to my new apartment building on the edge of Georgetown, conveniently located right between the Russian Embassy and the Naval Observatory where the VP lives.
Nosy girls like to be in the middle of the action. You never know when you’re going to overhear a grumpy staffer say the right/wrong thing while getting coffee.
I pull into the parking garage, quickly decelerating. A quick glance in my rearview mirrors as the secure door rolls up, then I pull through and wait until it closes behind me.
Once I stash my bike in the storage unit I got instead of a parking stall—one of the main reasons I picked this building—I head upstairs to my second-floor studio.
I don’t need a lot of space. Room for a bed, a desk, and a window for my aloe vera plant. Her name is Monica, and I bought her because she reminds me of California. The sun, the salty air.
The distance between me and my past. Jason.
Monica—being a plant—is unfamiliar with that complicating factor. Lucky Monica.
I set my helmet on its spot next to the aloe vera, under the window that overlooks the Naval Observatory, and I go to the kitchenette to get an extra-stiff drink.
What was Jason’s interest in crashing the party tonight? Because I have no doubt that’s how he got there. He looked cozy with the French Ambassador’s young wife, which had to be strategic on his part.
He had never been interested in playing the bull. But maybe he’s changed in the last five years. It’s none of my business. Whatever his business is—at least personally—I burned any claim to that man’s flesh when I ghosted him and his firm.
But politically…maybe there’s a story there.
I wrinkle my nose. I don’t like the idea of Jason As a Story. It’s why I left. But that was in the before times. Before the last election, before everything changed, before Lively killed himself. Before Amelia Dashford Reid went off the deep end.
And now I live in an empty studio apartment while I try to hack the time-intensive process of finding sources in a city I’ve done my damnedest to ignore for half a decade. Hence the catering job that I can’t go back. Fucking Jason, what a party-pooper.
I snicker to myself and toss back half my drink. He’d have liked it if I called him that. He’d find it cheeky.
The tequila burns, so I set the glass down and fire up my computer to check my encrypted email addresses. A few messages from sources for long-game stories I’m working on back burners, one weird lead idea that doesn’t sound like it will go anywhere—yes, all the rich old men in this town are pedophiles, almost certainly, but I’m not going to fall for a variation on the pizzagate story. I run a trace and sure enough, that email address has been used by a semi-infamous loser asshole who will do anything to make women look bad.
Delete.
The final note in my inbox makes me sit up a little straighter. It’s from an account inside the DC police force, and I recognize the name. Detective Kendra Browning. Ex-wife of Tag Browning, one of Jason’s partners in The Horus Group. What are the odds?
I’m not the type to believe in coincidences. My skepticism has driven me to sometimes find patterns and stories where none exist. Early in my career, that was drummed out of me. I had to learn that sometimes, a coincidence is just that.
But still…
I flip over to Twitter. Does Detective Browning have an account? Not that I can tell. I do, albeit an anonymous one.
There aren’t many people in this world who know anything about me. There are no photographs of me as Melinda Gray, Intrepid Girl Reporter. Anonymous author of Private Jet, Private Hell. I have social media accounts and by-lines, but they’re all dead ends as far as finding a real person behind them. So the chances that Detective Browning knows that I know her through a different channel are slim.
My pulse thumps heavy at the base of my throat as I read the subject line for a second time.
From: Detective Kendra Browning
To: Melinda Gray
Subject: Request for an interview (background information)
I click into the message.
In the course of an investigation, some of your articles have popped onto my radar…
I scan the rest of the message and type a standard reply.
From: Melinda Gray
To: Detective Kendra Browning
Subject: Re: Request for an interview (background information)
I never reveal my sources. I don’t think I can be of any help to the police in this matter.
But I don’t hit send. I read her message back again, then scowl at the blinking cursor. I drain my glass, go to the kitchen for a refill, then come back.
The cursor flashes at me as if to say, this isn’t the right reply.
Why not?
What am I missing? What is my instinct pinging on, and why can’t I see it? I dig out my burner phone, the one with only one contact—Caroline—and fire off a cryptic message. Then I close the laptop. I don’t need to reply right away.
Maybe it’s that I don’t want to reply without disclosing that we know each other from another time, another life. I can picture the good detective from her visits to the Horus Group offices.
I could disclose that prior connection, if need be, but not in writing. I have before, to Taylor Dashford Reid, a former client of The Horus Group and a fellow absconder to the west coast. In the year since I printed her story, I’ve never had any reason to think she told anyone who I am. But a third brush with that past life, and on the same night as a near run-in with Jason?
It’s enough to make an already paranoid investigator think something was definitely up.
A glow of headlights out my window catches my eye. A slow-moving caravan of vehicles is driving down one of the lanes on the property of the Naval Observatory. There’s a story there, in the comings and goings of the property’s most famous residents—and the visitors they get.
D.C. is full of stories, though, and I don’t know if I want to tell them anymore.
Maybe my next project will be my swan song in journalism, and I can silently fade into the night. I’ll reinvent myself as a barista in Kansas or something similarly wholesome.
Maybe one day I’ll even find someone to share all of this with.
I can’t imagine how that would even go. Funny story…
Laughing to myself, I reach for my glass—but I freeze before I pick it up. Why on God’s green acres did those two words pop into my head like that? Jason Fucking Evans.
“Funny story…” is how we ended up crossing the line between employer and employee in the first place.