He laughed once, the sound short, sharp, and utterly humorless.
“Oh, he already knows, I’m sure,” Ben said.
Her face crumpled.
Beside my desk, Mei stood perfectly still, tablet clutched to her chest like a shield.
“Do you want me to cut audio?” she asked quietly.
“No,” I said.
Ben reached for Chrissy then, not to touch her intimately, not to pull her close, but to steady her, hands on her arms, grounding and controlled.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Whatever happens next, you keep your mouth shut. You don’t confess. You don’t beg. You don’t explain. Don’t do anything that will give anyone an excuse to hurt you. Maybe there’s a way to salvage things despite how bad this looks.”
“I can’t?—”
“You can,” he snapped, then softened immediately. “You have to.”
She nodded, tears streaking down her cheeks.
“I didn’t mean to — I just — you felt so different from him. I needed to know what it was like to be with you, just once, before this was all over.”
That did it.
Ben’s jaw clenched. His hands dropped from her arms like he’d been burned.
I exhaled slowly. That sentence alone could dismantle months of careful psychological architecture.
Ben swung his legs off the bed.
“Get dressed.”
“What?”
“Get dressed,” he repeated. “They’ll come for you first. You’re a contestant. I’m just a groundskeeper. They’ll worry about me later.”
She stared at him, horror dawning.
“They’re not going to?—”
“Yes,” he said. “They are going to call you on the carpet for this, and I’m so sorry for that, but if you just throw me under the bus, maybe you can fix things. Maybe, just maybe, you won’t lose everything because I was incapable of staying away from you.”
She sobbed once, sharp and broken, then scrambled for the cashmere sweater and boot cut jeans Mei had left behind for her. Her hands shook so badly she could barely dress.
Ben stood, naked and unashamed, staring up at the camera like he could see me through the lens.
For a long moment, neither of us moved. Then he inclined his head a fraction.
A warning that a shitstorm was likely coming, and promise to do whatever he could to fix last night’s fuck-up.
I turned to Mei.
“Escort Miss Jones to my office,” I said calmly. “House arrest, effective immediately. No contact. No exceptions.”
“And Mr. Stonewood?”
I watched Ben sit back down on the bed, elbows on his knees, head bowed — a man who had just remembered exactly what he was capable of.
