I walked over and set my helmet down before I peeled off my jacket, the heat catching up with me all at once. I dropped into the chair across from him, heart still thudding from the ride—and the guilt. Mostly the guilt.
“Hell of a morning,” I muttered.
Archie didn’t answer right away. Just passed me a folder. I didn’t have to open it to know what was inside.
“Sharon’s making her move,” he said, voice clipped, military-clean. “And she’s not playing games anymore.”
I nodded, the bile already rising in my throat.
The worst part wasn’t that she had dirt.
The worst part waswe gave it to her.
And I had no one to blame but myself.
I flipped the folder open.
The first page was tame—by our standards anyway. A printout of one of the video stills, us all laughing, soaked fromthe lake, sunburnt and stupid. Sharon had written a note in the corner in that impossible, neat handwriting of hers:
July 6th. Don't forget who was filming.
I turned the page.
Worse.
A photo from the dock party. Darker lighting, our faces just barely visible in the background while Sharon posed in the foreground—on purpose. Her eyes were on the camera. Not smiling. Just looking. Like she knew exactly what this would become. Like she was leaving a breadcrumb trail for us to choke on.
The next image made me drop the folder onto the table.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, pushing back in my chair. “We can’t use this. Wecannotuse this.”
Archie didn’t flinch. Just sipped from his stupid fruity looking drink and leaned back. “That’s not for you to decide.”
“You thinkthismakes it better?” I jabbed a finger at the open folder. “Some of this isx-rated, man.X-rated. That’s not just bad optics, it’s career-ending. It’s reputational suicide.”
Archie’s voice dropped an octave. “You think Sharon’s worried about optics?”
I stared at him. “You know women don’t get the same goddamn latitude we do. They don’t come back from stuff like this.”
“She’s not planning on coming back. She’s planning onwinning.”
I stood, pacing, trying to out-walk the weight settling in my chest. The heat clung to me like guilt.
“She’s gone nuclear, Bubba. That first drop was just a warning. She’s got more, and you know it. If we don’t hit back, sheownsthe narrative. She ownsus.”
“And if we do this?” I asked, turning back. “What then? We look vindictive, desperate. Like the kind of assholes who leak revenge porn because we got dumped by someone smarter than us.”
Archie’s eyes narrowed. “She didn’tdumpyou. Shetargetedyou. Don’t romanticize it.”
I rubbed the back of my neck, sweat and shame thick under my palm.
“You don’t get it,” I said. “You think we can just bounce back from this because we’ve always bounced back. But if we go there—if we dothis—we don’t just lose a PR battle. We loseeverything. Not just our careers. Our names. Our families. Our futures.”
I looked down at the folder again.
“Sharon throws a grenade, and we’re supposed to drop a damnbomb?”
“You fight fire with fire,” Archie said evenly. “Youknowthat.”
