“Me?” I cried. “Don’t blame this on me.”
“No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” Vienna said. “It was because of how Ifeltabout you. It was right after our big fight.”
I nodded her on. She didn’t have to rehash it to me—I’d never forget the day when she told me she felt like we were wasting our lives and all of the privilege we’d been granted by virtue of our birth, that she was tired of spending her time partying andsleeping in, that she wanted more. I’d taken it as an attack on me, which it kind of was, but only because she was attacking the both of us. She split and started her foundation and became the artsy, sophisticated Vienna Soo that everybody now knew, while I partied for another year before my fall from grace.
She continued, “I left our fight all fired up and ready to make a change. I immediately went to go start my foundation with money from my trust fund, but… well…” She hung her head, hopefully because she was embarrassed and not because she was trying to see if a mouse had run over her foot. “It turns out that it wasn’t as big as I’d thought it was, and a lot of what I did have liquid and ready to go was tied up in red tape. I knew I needed to make a splash if I really wanted my life to change so quickly, and I needed money for that, but I also didn’t want to, well, downgrade my quality of life.”
“Understandable,” I said. Not going to lie, I was feeling a little bit smug, because Ihaddowngraded my quality of life in order to start my foundation. Not, like, horribly so, but I’d learned when I went hunting for the apartment I eventually bought that I totally could’ve afforded another couple of bedrooms in my unit and a second swimming pool in the building if I weren’t such a charitable person.
“I’d made such a big, public declaration of what I wanted my life to look like, and I knew that if I didn’t get it moving right away, it might never happen.” Little spots of red bloomed on her cheeks. “And I was afraid of what you’d think. If I’d just sacrificed our whole friendship for nothing. My dad had done a little work with Greystone, and I picked up the CEO’s business card, and then… well…”
“So you took their money,” I finished. “Honestly, Vee, it’s notthatbad.”
“That’s not how people are going to see it,” she said. She paused, cocked her head, considered. “Unless we start the PRspin right away. Put it out there that I was naive, that I had no idea who they were, that I was just so desperate to do good…”
“And that you took their evil money and did good things with it,” I said. “It could work.”
“It could totally work.” The color was coming back to her face, some of the spirit to her eyes. “Okay. Okay, so my life isn’t over.”
“Not like Conrad’s.” We shared a mirthless grin. “So he found out somehow and was blackmailing you? You weren’t having an affair?”
“An affair? With him?” She scrunched up her whole face like I’d tried to feed her the rotting mouse corpse in the corner. “God, my God, no.Gross.Ugh. How could you even think that?”
“I didn’t think that. My mom’s friend apparently saw you out with him and decided that’s what was going on.”
“Ew, gross,” she repeated. “No. I barely knew who he was until he asked me to lunch. I figured, why not, maybe he’d invest in my foundation and I’d get a good lunch out of it. But he told me what he’d found out and that he wanted me to pay him to keep it secret.”
“How much? The man has more money than God; why did he need yours?”
Her face turned somber. “He didn’t want money. He wanted me to pretend to date him. I guess there were cracks in his marriage? He thought his wife might be having an affair and he was afraid she’d leave him and he’d be this old man alone with his money.”
Hmm. Bibi was cheating on him? I filed the information away for later. That would explain the timing of him coming to me with his building donation. I’d get him back into the social scene he’d been pushed out of. And a pretty young thing on his arm… “Why wouldn’t he just hire an escort to pretend to date him, then?”
She shook her head. “I asked the same thing. What he wantedmore than anything was his social capital back. Having a hot escort pretending to be in love with him on his arm might score him points with other creepy old guys, but not anyone else. He needed to date someone everybody knew, someone everybody liked and admired, someone who’d get him through the doors that had closed in his face. And I was just the lucky girl whose incriminating information turned up first.”
“I see,” I said slowly. “So when you two were arguing in the corner at the gala…?”
She full-body cringed. “Ugh, you heard that? I was trying to stall for time to figure out how best to handle him. I told him I didn’t have the stomach yet for what he was asking of me. I guess Bibi must have overheard us too. I assume I’m the ‘skank.’ I followed her out after to try and explain, but she wasn’t interested in talking; she just pushed past me on the way out of the bathroom and stormed off.” She sighed. “I think my earring fell off when she pushed me, because when I checked myself out in the mirror after leaving the stall, it was gone.”
“I wonder how it ended up in Conrad’s hand,” I said.
He could’ve found it on the floor in the hallway and innocently picked it up, figuring that someone would be looking for it. Or somebody else could have found it. Someone who’d seen the interaction between Vienna and Conrad and thought that, maybe, it could be useful for whatever they were planning.
Or maybe it had ended up stuck to Bibi somehow as they were pushing past each other. And then Bibi went after Conrad, newly furious about him and his “skank.” Only, if she’d been cheating on him first, would she really get that mad about him cheating on her?
Before I could voice any of those thoughts to Vienna, a creak sounded overhead. Then another. “Did you hear that?” I asked.
She glanced upward, as if she’d be able to see whatever had caused it through the ceiling. “It sounded like—”
Thump.“Footsteps,” she finished with a whisper.
CHAPTER
Fifteen
We should not be hearing footsteps right now. Nobody else was supposed to be in the building. If Gabe had changed his mind and wanted to come meet me, he would’ve texted to let me know. I checked my phone just in case he had and I’d missed it, but I didn’t have any signal down here in the basement. I telepathically asked Vienna if she had any, my eyes flicking down to her phone in her hand. She glanced down, pursed her lips, shook her head. No.
The footsteps grew louder.Thump, thump, thump.Big and heavy, like they were coming from a large man wearing work boots. I froze, holding my breath, as if he’d be able to hear the air moving in and out of my lungs.
