“I want you to learn from a senior reporter.” Her smile widened sweetly. “Consider it professional development.”
She walked away before I could respond, heels clicking against the floor like a victory march.
I opened the folder and stared at pages of notes that would take me days to sort through. Days I didn’t have. Days I should have been spending on my own work.
Across the newsroom, Ethan caught my eye and mimed hanging himself with an invisible rope.
I got to work.
The email arrived at nine forty-three that night.
I was on my couch in pajamas with my laptop open to a show I wasn’t watching, nursing a cup of coffee that had gone lukewarm. The apartment was quiet except for the radiator’s death rattle and the faint sound of Candy’s TV through the wall.
My phone buzzed.
I picked it up expecting nothing—a newsletter, spam, another polite rejection from Simon Tucker’s PR team telling me that Mr. Tucker was not accepting interview requests at this time.
The sender’s name made my stomach clench.
J. Specter.
Subject line:Repair Estimate.
I opened it, downloaded the attachment, and took a casual sip of coffee while the file loaded.
The number appeared on my screen.
Coffee went down the wrong pipe. I choked, coughed, inhaled at exactly the wrong moment, and hot liquid seared the back of my throat.
I doubled over hacking and sputtering with tears streaming down my face, and my phone tumbled to the floor with a clatter.
When I could finally breathe again, when my lungs remembered their basic function, I picked up the phone with watering eyes and looked at the number again.
It hadn’t changed.
I counted the zeros. One, two, three, four. That couldn’t be right. I counted again. Four zeros. Four.
That was more zeros than I had ever seen attached to a repair bill, or anything that wasn’t a mortgage or a ransom demand.
That was “sell a kidney on the black market” money.
With that money I could escape California and start over with a new identity in a place where no one had ever heard the name Jack Specter.
For a scratch. A tiny dent that probably wasn’t even visible unless you got down on your hands and knees with a magnifying glass and a personal vendetta.
I started laughing, and the sound came out slightly unhinged, bouncing off the walls of my small apartment like the cackle of someone who had officially lost her grip on reality. This was absurd. Genuinely, spectacularly, magnificently absurd.
Jack Specter, billionaire, heir to a fortune that could fund small nations, had sent me an itemized invoice for an amount that would require me to auction off organs I was currently using.
Sure I had given him my business card, but I hadn’t expected it to be this expensive.
He was pettier than I’d expected. Spectacularly, gloriously, almost impressively petty.
He’d told me I could dent his car anytime I wanted, once. A lifetime ago. Apparently that offer had expired.
I set the phone down on the coffee table and pressed my hands to my face. My throat still burned from the coffee, my eyes still watered, and my dignity was somewhere on the floor, whimpering softly.
I forced myself not to think about freshman Pauline and scratched bumpers and a boy who’d laughed and said, “It’s just metal.”
