“I know. But you need to take this call.”
I turned to look at her. She was holding the phone out to me with an expression I’d never seen on her face before, urgency and tenderness and the particular look of a woman who was trying very hard not to cry.
“Who is it?”
“Graham,” she said. “He watched the interview. He called Kaya, Kaya gave him my number. Rose, he says he has proof.”
My hands went still. “Proof of what?”
“Everything. Denise. The bank account. All of it.” Maggie pushed the phone closer. “Take it.”
I stared at the phone in her hand. Graham. Calling Maggie because I wasn’t answering my own phone. Because he’d found another way around my walls, the way he always found another way, patient and stubborn and unwilling to let me disappear.
I took the phone.
“Hi,” I said.
Silence for a moment. Just his breathing and the wind on his end, and water somewhere nearby. He was outside too.
“Hi,” he said. His voice was rough. Wrecked. Like he’d been crying or running or both. “I watched the interview.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.” A pause. “Rose, what you did in that studio. Going in without evidence. Saying Denise’s name with nothing but your word.” His voice cracked. “You’re either the bravest person I’ve ever met or the most reckless.”
“Maggie says those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
He almost laughed. “Rose, I have proof. Everything you said about Denise is true. I hired a forensic accountant after I left Colorado. Her name is on the bank account. She signed the documents in person, three months before Taylor ever started at the ranch. She set the whole thing up.”
I sat there with the phone pressed to my ear and the city swimming below me.
Relief.
Not because the truth was good. The truth was devastating. The truth was that my best friend had been a predator and I’d been her mark and everything I’d feared in that studio, everything I’d accused Denise of without proof, was real.
“I didn’t know,” I said quietly. “When I did the interview. I didn’t have proof.”
“I know. That’s why it mattered.” His voice was very soft. “She can’t sue you for defamation now, Rose. Because it’s not defamation if it’s true.”
The knot that had been tightening in my gut since the freeway loosened. Not all the way. But enough to breathe.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because I’m an idiot who thought sitting on the truth was the same thing as protecting you.” He exhaled. “I was wrong. About that. About all of it.”
“You weren’t an idiot. You were scared.”
“Aye. Same thing, sometimes.”
“Come to New York,” I said.
“Rose—”
“I’m serious. Come. Maggie has a guest room and the twins will probably try to eat your shoes, but come.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
