“Nobody cares what the truth is.”
“Maybe not, but you won’t know until you put it out there. You have to take better care of yourself, Tori. You have to stick up for yourself. You can’t blame people for believing his hype if you don’t give them your side of the story.”
For long seconds, she doesn’t say anything else. Instead she just stands there quietly, drinking her smoothie and—I hope—pondering what I’ve said. Eventually, though, the smoothie is gone. And so is the defeated look in her eyes.
“He did this,” she says as she puts her glass down on the nearest table. “Not me. I shouldn’t be the only one paying because he’s an asshole.”
“Exactly,” I agree with a nod.
“I’ll call Chloe, but I need to borrow your phone to do it.”
“My phone?” I ask, even as I reach into my pocket and pull out my iPhone. “What’s wrong with yours?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it. Unless you count it currently being in my father’s possession.”
“Your father? Why is that?” I hold my phone out to her.
She takes the phone and a deep breath. Then says, “Because he disowned me this morning.”
Chapter 9
Tori
“Disowned you?” Miles sputters, even as he stares at me like he’s never heard the word before in his life. “What exactly does that mean?”
“You know, disowned. As in, no longer belonging to. As in, no longer his responsibility. As in, no longer allowed access to my trust fund—or the apartment, car, laptop, cellphone, and everything else that I’ve paid for with it. Disowned.”
He still looks confused—which in other circumstances would amuse me, as I never thought it’d be little old me who’d be able to say something to stump the resident genius—so I start to give him yet another definition of the word. But he’s got his hand up in the universal gesture for stop talking, so I do. It’s not like I really wanted to hash it all out again anyway.
He’s silent for a few more seconds, his eyes searching my face like he’s trying to figure out if I’m kidding. I only wish I was.
The silence has grown uncomfortable—at least on my part—before he finally asks, “Are you telling me that your father tossed you out of your apartment this morning?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“While the paparazzi were probably swarming around.”
“No probably about it,” I say with a deliberately careless tilt of my head. “The paps were everywhere.”
I’d had to do some fancy evasive maneuvers to avoid them—and even then, I didn’t succeed completely. They took a lot of photos of me coming out of the building, some of me ducking into my gym to get away, and though I managed to lose them by getting the management to let me out a side door, the paps were no dummies. A bunch of them were waiting for me at the bottom of Ethan and Chloe’s driveway.
Considering what I looked like at that point, with my smeared makeup, bleeding foot, and last night’s dress, I can only imagine what tomorrow’s gossip rag headlines are going to read. I figure most are going to go with the whole “Tori Reed gives new meaning to the walk of shame,” but I’m sure there will be a few outliers in the group. A few surprises to make me cringe.
“He threw you into the middle of a pack of paps without so much as your cellphone or your purse? Without any money?”
“In his defense, he did give me five minutes to grab what I needed.”
“As long as what you needed didn’t include your credit cards or anything that might actually be of use to you.”
“You should probably stop talking now,” I tell him as my stomach starts to churn all over again.
He lifts a brow. “And why is that exactly?”
“Because somehow you make an already sucky situation sound a million times worse.”
“That’s because it’s worse than sucky. What he did to you was unconscionable. Tossing you into a pack of hyenas with no way to protect yourself. What kind of man does something like that?”
“I had two hundred dollars in cash in my nightstand.”