“Babes?”
“Hold on. I’m processing.”
“Your eye is twitching.”
“Processing!”
“Okay, Commander Data, take your time,” Becka said in the tone reserved for placating angry toddlers.
“Now is not the time for Star Trek references!” I took a breath. “Okay, so let me make sure I fully understand. Celine was so in love with TK that he was able to persuade her to breach like fourteen different confidentiality clauses, probably the law, and email some gossip rag the footage?”
“Basically,” Becka confirmed. “Clara-Beth said that Celine said that Trevor said he wanted to make sure you ‘never worked in this industry again’.”
“Holy hell,” I said, faintly, as an image of TK with a vaudevillian style moustache entered my brain. I could imagine him twirling it. A shiver slinked down my spine.
“We’re certain this is the leak? That it was absolutely not Trevor?”
“He may have orchestrated it, but according to IT, the only time this footage left the building was via an email from Celine’s work email tomissmilleniumbaby87‘at’ whatever.com.”
“So how do we know what happened after that?”
“Celine! I guess she cracked under pressure and sang like a bird.” Becka threw her hands up in the air. “I think she’s known for a while that the jig is up. Remember I told you how shady she’s been recently? She’s probably suspected for months that she was gonna get caught. Clara-Beth said that when she found her, she was hysterical, wouldn’t shut up. That’s how we have the whole story. She says she told them everything, including admitting to sending it to Trevor’s guy, but most importantly, admitting Trevor’s involvement.”
“Good grief.” I dragged a hand down my face.
Becka snorted. “I know, right?”
I fell silent, running over the events in my head. It was a strange thing to realise that someone had deliberately acted in a way designed to hurt you. There was no way she could have been ignorant of the possible consequences of leaking the footage.
I resisted the urge to bite my thumbnail, instead picking at it until it stung.
“I kind of don’t know how to feel about this,” I admitted.
Becka sighed. “I hear that. But hey, at least you know you don’t have a criminal mastermind gunning for you. Celine is a lot of things, but mastermind she is not.”
I huffed out a laugh.
It didn’t matter that Celine’s motive for sending the footage was down to some love-sick misadventure. To her, it hadn’t been personal, and in a way, that was worse, because she’d been willing to throw us to the wolves only because she thought it would, what? Make Trevor Kyle like her more? The thought process almost made me feel sorry for her.
Almost – because I thought about those months we’d spent looking over our shoulders, of tabloid speculation, triggering Jihoon’s press-related trauma...
All the times he’d been called into secret meetings with ENT executives and lawyers. The time I had been dragged into one such meeting and had been made to feel like a dirty affair partner.
What Celine had done had had real world consequences, but it hadn’t been personal. Not to her.
I bit my lip so hard I flinched as the taste of iron hit my tongue.
I wanted to hate her, because it might help to have a target I could feel vindicated about, knowing she was getting her own repercussions, but I couldn’t ignore the TK of it all. Celine was a big girl, and she’d acted of her own accord, but she had doneit on his instruction. Somehow I doubted that would hold up in court.
Fuck it. I couldn’t help but feel that we had all been played by TK, and that, unfortunately, made it impossible for me to hate her.
“Is Celine gonna get sued?” I asked as the thought occurred to me.
“I don’t know,” Becka shrugged. “Sounds like a classic case of fuck around and find out.”
I barked out a laugh.
Becka continued; “Her legal fate falls well out of my jurisdiction. Why don’t you ask that pretty boyfriend of yours?”
