The biting voicemail I’d left Jack began to replay in my head as I felt myself cowering a little. “Do I answer it?”
She nodded. “Yes, but proceed with caution.”
I answered the call and put him on speaker, because I was a good friend and I knew Sunny would just press her ear asclose to the phone as she could anyway. Bracing myself, I said, “Hello?”
“I forgive you,” Jack said flatly.
Sunny’s jaw dropped, and I could see the inner battle unfolding in her head as she tried her best not to say something snarky right back to him.
I held up a finger and gave her a patient but stern look. The last thing I needed or wanted was for the two of them to get into a shouting match. It would quickly devolve. Of that I could be sure.
“Excuse me?” I asked. “Youforgiveme?”
“For the voicemail,” he explained. “We can pretend like I never even listened to it... especially the part about MissCrumpets.”
“Are we just going to skip over the fact that you outed me as a sex worker to mainstream media?”
“Is that what you think?” he asked. “Bee, I’m a lot of things... but that’s a step too far even for me. You know I only ruin lives tastefully.”
“But you called and left that threatening voicemail! You were already pissed I bailed on our scene.”
“That wasn’t threatening! How could you even perceive that as threatening?”
Sunny bit back a chuckle as she rolled her eyes.
I sank to the edge of the bed, feeling a little silly for jumping to conclusions. “Well, if you weren’t threatening me, then what were you doing?”
“I was warning you!” he exclaimed. “That Dominic Diamond sleazeball reached out to me to confirm your identity.He had that picture of you and Nolan—who by the way, still has it—in that strip club.”
“Oh.”
A deflated Sunny sat down beside me.
“Maybe next time you’re trying to pull one over on the Hope Channel, you should avoid the local strip club.”
“So it all started with that picture?” I asked, remembering Nolan’s hesitancy and sweet little Prancer’s promise to keep the photo to herself.
I could practically hear the bored shrug in his voice. “It’s not like your Bianca identity was ever a secret. Only you and Teddy would be stupidly optimistic enough to think this would work.”
I looked to Sunny, and she winced a little, which told me she didn’t think Jack was entirely wrong. I had been so confident that the Hope Channel stream would never cross the porn stream. I was so sure that those audiences were two totally different people. Maybe they were, but maybe they weren’t.
And something about that made me uneasy and hopeful at the same time.
I sighed loudly. “Well, thanks for going to the trouble to warn me, Jack. I appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome. And you can repay me by getting me a former boy band member to be my postdivorce rebound.”
“Bye, Jack.”
A peppy yip in the background rang through the speaker as we hung up, and I truly hoped it was MissCrumpets.
Teddy and I sat in the production office, staring at each other from across the room like two kids who had been sent to the principal’s office—if a principal’s office looked like a Victorian parlor with a desk and a decade-old copier shoved inside. And even though it was officially after Christmas now, the old house was still glowing with Christmas trees, fake candles, and fairy lights. It was hard not to feel slightly mocked by all its Balsam Hill cheer.
“You sure you don’t know anything?” I asked for the fifth time.
He shook his head. “The Hope Channel has dropped to zero communication with me.”
I knew this was coming from the moment Teddy broke the news to me on Christmas Eve, but that didn’t stop every muscle in my body from aching with dread. Jack was right. We were foolish to think this could work.
