The article is live for less than fifteen minutes. It’s more than enough.
It’s short and disjointed and inelegant, in desperate need of an editor, and throughout the frantic half-hour of writing it I’m sure that there are things I’m forgetting, or omitting, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s out there, and it can’t be taken back, and it can’t be ignored, especially given the source. My login credentials for Reel were never revoked, after Cannes, and though it seemed impossible that the system would really let me publish the article, I also know that digital journalism has evolved too fast for old-school publishers to keep up, and that editorial hierarchy is nowhere near the top of the priority list for the people who build these systems. All I’m doing is exploiting an oversight.
I suspect that Reel’s first move, after taking the article down, will be to claim that they were hacked. So I take a selfie of myself beside the headline on my laptop screen, and post it on my Twitter account with the words: ‘Yes, I wrote it.’
The only part that I left out, the part I deleted and reinserted before ultimately deleting for good, was the truth about Skye. She would be known for ever as the product of rape, if only allegedly, and whatever becomes of her next she deserves more than this.
Going to Tom’s is not fair. I’m not proud. But his is the only address I have in my head, the only place I can imagine feeling safe, and of course he buzzes me in right away. He answers the door in his bathrobe, hair damp from the shower, and I want to bury myself against him and let him save me. But I can’t. I’m on this path now, and I won’t take him with me.
And so we sit across from each other in his messy kitchen, our hands clasped around mugs of strong Tetley tea like we always drank at university, not touching. I tell him, and he doesn’t question my judgement or my motives or my story, doesn’t appear sceptical of the truth about Clark, doesn’t doubt me for a moment.
‘What are you going to do?’ is the question he does ask me.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m not even sure what happens in that situation. A reporter publishing a story without permission – I mean, it’s a true fable for the digital age.’
‘All these big legacy brands now run on a CMS that half their staff don’t understand. It’s amazing this doesn’t happen more.’
‘Has it ever happened before?’
I shrug.
‘I may have done something truly unprecedented.’ My bravado is shaky. The unspoken truth around the edges of all this, the truth neither of us will touch, is that this will likely be the last article I ever publish. That, at the very least, my life as I know it is over.
Tom’s housemates are both thankfully out of town, and after flatly refusing to let him give me his bed, I sleep more deeply on his futon than I have in weeks. My sleep is so deep, my exhaustion so profound, that I pass out while it’s still light outside and wake up in the dark, disoriented, flooded with panic until I remember where I am. And what I did.
My phone is in aeroplane mode. I’m not checking my emails or Twitter or the news, and maybe this makes me a true blockbuster hero, walking stoically away from the explosion I just caused without looking back at the fallout. Or maybe it makes me a coward, head in the sand.
Tom finds me out on the tiny deck as the first pastel flickers of dawn are rising, smoking.
‘Since when…?’ he asks, gesturing between me and the pack of Camels I found on the patio table.
‘Seemed like the time to start again.’
The cigarette’s not giving me the warm jolt it used to, though, and it’s doing nothing to curb the curls of anxiety in my stomach. I let Tom finish it.
‘I was thinking. We should go home to England.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah,’ he says, as though he’s trying to convince himself. ‘He can’t chase you all the way over there, right?’
‘He probably could.’ I don’t know, in truth, the length of Clark’s reach.
‘Well, they’re not going to extradite you back to the US for a civil case, if he sues you.’
‘You’ve thought about this more than I have.’
‘You haven’t committed a crime. Reel gave you publishing access, it’s not like you hacked them. The most anyone can do is sue, and if you’re in England you’ll be fine. Right?’
‘You just got here. The very first show you got cast in actually got picked up, and it’s a hit. Do you have any idea how rare that is? You’d be insane to walk away.’
‘Jess, it’s you.’
I look at him and wonder when he came to love me this much. How he possibly can when I have nothing to offer him, when I’ve sold out everything I ever was. He can’t see it yet, that I’m a shell, but he will.
‘No,’ I tell him quietly. ‘I won’t let you do that for me. You deserve this. This career, this life. The glow.’
‘What?’
I kiss him quickly, not letting myself linger, not letting this feel like anything but closure. Clark is still all over me, inside me, spilling out of my pores like something rotten. I feel toxic.
He makes me breakfast and I try to eat it. He tries to make conversation, tries to make suggestions, and I try not to snap at him. I know that I can’t stay here for very much longer, but when I imagine what’s next it’s a blank space, an absence where my future should be. When he goes to answer the door, the moment of silence is endless.
‘Um— Jess?’
I follow the sound of his voice, and find Skye Conrad standing in Tom’s hallway, and my first thought is that Clark has sent her like an assassin. She’s wearing all black, leggings and sweater and sneakers, and her hair is cut short.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask, trying to see behind her to check for Clark or for Lenny. But she came here alone.
‘You said you wanted to get out of town.’
‘Yeah, but that was before—’ Before I published an article calling your father an abusive rapist. ‘How did you even find me here?’
She glances at Tom.
‘This is your boyfriend, right?’
A shiver of guilt, as I remember the lie I told her so effortlessly back in Venice. Trying to convince her that there was nothing between me and Clark. I shake my head, glancing apologetically at Tom whose face is unreadable.
‘You wanted to leave,’ she says, and she sounds resolute, focused. ‘I’m leaving. My car’s outside.’
‘Does Clark know you’re going?’
She looks incredulously at me.
‘You really think he’d let me go? You’re more deluded than I thought. You should leave too, while you still can.’
I don’t hesitate for long. Within ten minutes, I’m letting Tom hold me for too long as we say goodbye, and putting two bags that contain all my worldly possessions into the back of Skye’s car. In the end, I abandoned most of my things at the Studio City apartment – books, toiletries, clothes I used to wear to junkets and premieres and parties. All just stuff, vestiges of a life that’s now over. Let Clark burn all of it.
I watch the Hollywood sign disappear into the distance as we drive down the freeway, growing smaller and smaller until it’s indistinguishable from the hills. Skye keeps quietly crying as she’s driving, and pretending not to be, and I’m pretending not to see. Her one-hand grip on the steering wheel terrifyingly loose, her other hand wiping tears from her face, and if we make it to wherever we’re going then we will have to work on this, we will have to figure out how to speak to each other.
At a gas station just north of Malibu, I try. We bought snacks that neither of us has any intention of eating, and now we’re sitting in the parking lot with them spread out before us, at a stalemate.
‘I didn’t mention you in the article,’ I tell her.
‘I know.’
I steel myself to say something I would never have had the courage to consider a week ago. But now my nerves are already raw and I have nothing to lose.
‘Bridget was your real mother. The woman who Clark—’
As it turns out, there are still things I can’t say. But she knows. It’s why she left.
‘It takes a lot of strength to do what you’re doing,’ I try next. ‘To get out. I know how much you relied on him, how he felt like your only family—’
‘Just shut up,’ she says quietly, and I do.
A couple of hours later as we’re nearing Morro Bay, the sky begins to shift around us. I’ve heard about the microclimates in northern California before, how blazing sun can give way to mist within a mile, but watching it happen is disorienting. The road up ahead is consumed by what looks like a ground-level cloud, obscuring everything beyond, and though I glance nervously at Skye she has no reaction, driving directly into it as the world darkens.
‘Fog isn’t a bad place to hide,’ I joke. But the truth is that this is creepy, and only gets more so as the sun goes down. We agreed to drive until we reach Monterey, where Skye says she has a friend, but it’s another three hours away and I’m exhausted. I’m also afraid to fall asleep in the passenger seat, lest we wake up upside down in a ditch.
‘Maybe we should find a motel,’ I suggest, but she ignores me. And for the first time it occurs to me that I’m sharing a car with someone unstable, someone who could do me just as much harm as the people I’m running from. Maybe she really was sent to kill me, to finish us both off at once.
These anxious, jagged thoughts of death are familiar, they happen to me under stress and when I’m tired, and I have to hold them at bay.
‘Skye?’
‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘Let’s just get to Monterey.’ She sounds tense, an unfamiliar tone for her, and she’s looking in her rear-view mirror more than seems necessary. Dread shuffles in my chest, and I stay silent.
It begins to rain, hard. Watching the windshield wipers clear their circular swathes again and again reminds me of being a child, watching this same endless pattern from the backseat. I’m dozing, half-lost in memory, and wake up with a jolt as the car abruptly picks up speed.
‘What’s happening?’ I ask Skye, and then I see in the rear-view mirror. An unmistakable black SUV is following us, Lenny in the driver seat just visible through the rain. Panic is rising, my chest tightening and I can’t believe that this is really happening, they have really followed us all this way and now they will run us off the road.
Skye takes a sharp turn onto an exit ramp, getting off the freeway at the last possible minute and speeding into the darkness, and for a while I think we’re free. But before long Lenny’s headlights are back behind us, golden in the fog, and now we’re driving towards the sea and soon there will be no more road.
‘Just pull over,’ I murmur finally, resigned. But she lets them pursue us all the way to the beach, finally coming to a stop inches from the ocean. The air is clearer here, the water glistening, and behind us Lenny’s engine stops, and this is yet another moment in which I realize I have underestimated Skye. She wants them to think there’s a possibility that she will drive this car into the sea, drown us both, make them keep their distance out of caution. It works.
‘Skye!’ Clark yells, and she winds down her window to respond but does not get out of the car.
‘Leave us alone!’
‘I just want to know that you’re okay. You just disappeared, honey, you can’t do that – I’ve been frantic.’
‘You were never gonna let me go.’
‘That’s not true,’ Clark says plaintively. ‘If I thought that was what you really wanted, of course I’d let you leave. But sweetheart, where are you driving to? San Francisco? You’re planning to, what, to get a job in Silicon Valley? You don’t have a plan, you don’t know what you want to do with your life—’
‘How would you know?’ she asks, and I want to tell her to stop engaging him, that the more she makes this a conversation, the more he will think he can win. Every conversation we ever had was a negotiation, a transaction.
He’s closer now, a few feet from the car. I turn cautiously to look behind us and there he is, his hair tousled, his face a mask of pain. He sees me see him.
‘Jessica,’ he calls out now. ‘Listen to me – you were right to publish that article. You were right. I needed someone to hold me accountable, because God knows nobody ever has, and it’s you. You know me better than anyone.’
He thinks I will be swayed by this, that I will swoon, and who can blame him? From the corner of my eye I see Skye watching me, probably wondering too.
‘I need you both,’ he continues, his voice cracking in the wind. ‘I want to be a better man, I want to take responsibility for the things I’ve done, and I can’t do any of it without you.’
‘Leave us alone,’ Skye tells him again, and when he speaks next his tone has changed.
‘Look, I don’t want to do this. But honey, you’re still in outpatient treatment, and if I tell them you’ve absconded they will have you held under a 5150. Every paper will get a hold of it, every blog, every news outlet. You’ve seen what happens to rising stars after a psychiatric hold – they are never known for anything else. I do not want that for you. You have too much potential.’
He is so clear to me now. So craven and small, so monstrous. He’s moving closer, Skye’s silence shredding his composure. ‘Skye. Stop this charade, now.’
Beside me Skye is opening the glove box, and now there’s a gun in her hand. I scrabble blindly for the door handle, pure adrenalin telling me to run, but Skye is already getting out of the car and she’s pointing the gun at her own head.
‘I am not your puppet,’ she screams at Clark, whose face has drained of colour. ‘I’m not some victim you can make disappear. I’m not my mom.’
I get out of the car too, numb, edging closer to her.
‘If you don’t get back in your car and drive back to LA, I will use this on myself. If anyone tries to come near us, if you try to follow us, or send us messages, I will use this on myself.’ Her voice trembles. ‘If I ever see you again, I will use this on myself.’
I believe her. And so does he.
‘When you regret this decision, in a month or two, know that you can come home. Take some time, cool off, and when you’re ready your suite will be there, untouched, waiting for you,’ Clark tells her, as he’s backing up gradually with hands in the air, as though he’s the one at gunpoint. This will be my final image of him, the one that lasts, the one that feels true.
‘Burn it to the ground,’ Skye snaps, and keeps the gun at her temple until he’s back in the SUV and Lenny’s starting the ignition, his face impassive as ever. The things he must have seen.
After the sound of their engine has faded into the distant buzz of the freeway, I reach out and put my hand on Skye’s arm. The bare skin of her wrist, just hard enough to feel her pulse there, to feel her alive. She doesn’t shake me off.