It’s someone from the media, I realize.
“No,” Connor says. “No, I’m not running for Senate. Because I’ve been told by my father since I was a child that to be in politics you have be a role model. Which is absurd, when you think about it. So a life with an erotica author isn’t something I could have. Wasn’t something I could keep. Was something I’d have to give up. Or at least,” Connor says, looking at his father again, “keep it a secret, right, Dad?”
His father goes pale.
He knows.
Connor knows, and Christopher knows, and I know and now the whole world is gonna know too.
“The way my father kept his affairs secret.”
It’s almost impossible to hear him now. The room has erupted in a cacophony of talking. The media are yelling questions.
“But one of my dear friends told me something the other day. He said, ‘She deserves better than that.’ And he’s right. She does. So I’m telling you now, I’m in love with this woman. She writes dirty, filthy, dark erotica. And she’s damn good at it too.”
I can’t help it. I smile.
“Because she wrote that book right there and every word is true. And not everyone can take a true story and weave it into a tale.”
“That book can’t be true,” someone calls out from the crowd. “That book says—”
“That book says,” Connor interrupts, “that my father had an affair, got caught by a group of college kids and his wife, then killed a man, shot Kiera Bonnaire in the shoulder, and hired psychiatrist Dr. Louise Livingston to drug us all up, week after week, month after month, and feed us a fake story to cover it up. She bullied us. She made us perform sexual acts with each other. She pumped us with drugs, and fake stories, and then—to make it feel as real as it possibly could—she made Kiera write it down.” He stops to point to the book in my hand. “That was not this book. That book is in the room behind me. This book,” he says, “is the true story of us. The Dirty Ones.”
“Lies,” Christopher Arlington sneers. “That’s all lies!”
“No!”
Every head turns to see Emily coming up behind Connor. Holding my book. The other book. The one with the Great Gatsby cover I didn’t think was real.
“I was there! I’m a Dirty One and none of this is lies. This is the book Kiera wrote ten years ago after he blamed me for shooting her and had me locked up in a mental hospital for attempted murder.”
“Ridiculous!” Christopher barks. “Cut the cameras! This press conference is over!”
No one cuts off a camera.
“I was there too,” Sofia says in her soft, gentle Sofia voice as she steps forward. “I’m a Dirty One. My initials are in that book. SA. Sofia Astor. He did this to me as well.”
“I’m a Dirty One too,” Hayes says. “HF. Hayes Fitzgerald. He fucked me over pretty good as well.”
“But,” Connor continues, still speaking into the mic even though it was turned off. Doesn’t matter. He projects his voice through the whole room. “There’s more. CD is Camille DuPont and BW is Bennett Winthrop. You might recognize their names from the news yesterday after they”—Connor makes air quotes—“‘killed themselves.’” He shakes his head. “They didn’t kill themselves. I don’t know what happened to them, but I suspect you’ll find drugs were involved and they will trace back to—”
“How dare you!” Louise spits. “How dare you say these things in my home!”
“How dare you,” Connor spits back. “How dare you fuck with the minds of innocent kids. How dare you erase me and my friends. How dare you lock up Emily Medici in a mental hospital because she refused to believe your lies! How dare you, Dr. Louise Livingston,” he seethes. “How dare you rewrite our story.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE – CONNOR
You are not allowed to steal words from people.
You’re not even allowed to borrow them without permission.
What they did to Kiera—what my father did, what Louise did… it makes me sick.
And I was the reader. They made her write those words and made me tell the story. Week after week. Month after month. That dark, sick, twisted tale of sexual perversion was woven into our minds with equal parts masterful manipulation and mind-altering drugs.
For what?
To save himself from a second-degree murder trial? That he would probably just buy his way out of?
They fucked with our heads. Made us believe things we never did. I don’t even know which parts are real and which parts are fiction. Did they have an anniversary party with balloons and butterflies? Did we meet up in person as a whole group? Or in pairs? Was Kiera really at every single session?
“My friends are dead,” I tell the crowd, not done yet. So not done yet. “My friends are dead, Emily was locked up in a hospital, and every one of us had our words stolen. But they also stole an entire year of our lives. They ripped our reality apart and replaced it with something ugly, and disgusting, and sick.”