“Wow,” I said quietly. “A whole different life.”
“A different world,” Becka agreed.
“It’s not weird,” I said to answer Becka’s question, “this is still my home, but it feels ike I’ve gone back in time. I feel like I could wake up any minute, and find out that the past year was a dream.” What I didn’t say was that in a way, everything having been a dream would make more sense than this being real.
We were silent for a few moments, each in our own reveries. It felt longer. But it also felt like no time at all.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Becka’s sudden excitement was like a record scratch on the movie playing in my mind, and I had to force myself to look back at the phone, where she had a strange expression on her face.
“I have a theory,” she went on, “about the video from the conference room. I don’t think it was TK.”
I had to forcibly reel myself back in, to go back to a place where I knew what she was talking about. A place where mentally I wasn’t sitting in my parent’s living room. I was on another sofa, five thousand miles away.
“Come again?” I said eventually .
“The footage of you and Jihoon,” she clarified, as if I could have forgotten. “I don’t think it was TK that leaked it outside of Pisces.” She seemed excited by the prospect.
I gave my head a shake. Why was everything this week feeling like stepping back in time? “Why are you bringing this up, all of a sudden?”
Becka tapped a finger against her chin. “There’s been a development. This didn’t come from me – we’re not supposed to talk about it,” she said quickly, eyes wide. “He’s officially been removed from the Pisces roster.”
“Removed?” I frowned. “What do you mean, ‘removed’?”
The last I’d heard, Trevor Kyle had gone AWOL from Pisces just before Christmas. At the time, I’d assumed it had something to do with his involvement in filming Jihoon and I, seeing as how Jihoon’s company were suing Pisces.
“Literally just that. Removed. Gone. He officially does not work for Pisces anymore.” Becka said the words with conviction, but her tone implied she was just as baffled as I was.
“We all thought he was on a hiatus, or something,” she went on. “Maybe laying low. But now the King has officially left the building, and we’re not allowed to talk about it.”
Holy hell.
“When you say ‘not allowed’,” I said slowly, rolling this information around in my head.
“I literally mean, ‘not allowed’.” Becka nodded emphatically. “We got an email telling us to remove all references to him from public-facing media, but that was it. I had to corner Celine to get anything else.”
“And?” I prompted.
“That’s just it!” Becka threw up her hands. “There’s nothing. Celine just said, ‘we’re not allowed to talk about it, get back to work.’” Becka’s nose wrinkled. “But what’s even weirder is that she looked… hmm, scared might be too strong, but definitely spooked.”
“Scared?” I repeated, incredulity making my voice pitch up an octave.
“Or spooked,” Becka repeated, shrugging.
Hearing that Trevor Kyle had officially been removed as a Pisces producer was shocking. He was a headliner, one of the main reasons people booked in with the studio. There weren’t many big artists he hadn’t worked with. That was the reason why Jihoon had first come to Pisces. It wasn’t because of the studio – it had been because ENT wanted Trevor Kyle, specifically.
Jihoon had been furious that he’d seemingly escaped being fired after knowingly filming us, but I hadn’t been surprised, having seen the way the studio accommodated him. He spun hay into gold, and they knew it.
But, perhaps he hadn’t escaped unscathed the way we’d assumed.
I blew out a breath. “Bloody hell. I’m gone a handful of months, and all hell breaks loose.”
Becka nodded sagely. “You made things more interesting. But that brings me back to my theory.” She pointed at the screen. “I don’t think he leaked the footage.”
I frowned.
“It had to have been him, it all started with him.” I ticked his offences off on my fingers. “He set us up by ensuring I’d go in there in the first place. He knowingly kept the cameras on. He leaked the video inside of Pisces just for kicks. If anything, surely this backs that theory up.”
“No,” Becka insisted. “It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve been thinking about this for ages. It never sat right with me. We just assumed it had to have been him because he turned the cameras back on, and uploaded the video to the shared servers for us all to see. But other than being a malicious asshole, he’s just not that deep. What does he get out of leaking the video publicly? Sued? Fired? I can see him thinking it was funny to put the video on the main server, but there’s a big leap between that and what actually happened.”
