Emmy slid back the door and stepped out of the closet.
Easton screamed, then fell to his ass on the floor.
“Shhh.” She placed a finger against her lips. “You don’t want anyone to hear, do you?”
He didn’t answer. He stared up at her with terror in his eyes, sweat sheening his face.
“Don’t worry,” Emmy said. “I won’t tell.”
“I didn’t—” Easton stuttered. “I didn’t mean it.”
A noise came from the bed. Georgia’s hands fluttered at her ruined throat as she tried to suck in air. Easton’s eyes locked on her. “Oh my god, she’s alive.”
Emmy crouched in front of him. Took his chin in her hand. Where had this confident woman emerged from? She couldn’t have said, but she directed his gaze back to her. “Do you want Georgia to leave this pool house and tell people what you did? That youalmost killedher? Imagine what your wife would say. Or those people at the network, the ones you’re always telling Dakota are waiting in the wings to take your job.”
His eyes widened. The film Emmy conjured in his mind was the source of his fear now.
Georgia was still stirring, making mewling sounds.
“If she leaves this room, your life is over.” Emmy rose. She’d stepped out of the closet into a role, a persona she wore like a new skin. God, she was good. A goddamn natural, casting directors be damned. Her hand closed around the lamp beside the bed, a heavy figurine of a mermaid curled on a rock, once part of Dakota’s childhood bedroom. Such an unexpected thing to have made its way out here.
She lifted it and locked eyes with Easton. “Do you want me to take care of this for you? All you have to do is say the word.”
This was the break she’d been waiting for. An hour ago, Emmy wouldn’t have been able to articulate it. Her best friend’s father on his knees, her rival’s sister gasping in bed, the fate of the entire Banks family in her hands. No matter what Easton decided, he would owe her. She remembered a famous line from one of her favorite TV shows, a superhero cartoon she used to watch with Dakota on the weekends when they were kids, a show Dakota was so proud her father’s network produced:Nowthisis girl power!
She tried hard not to smile.
Later, she would remember scrubbing herself in the pool house bathroom and making Easton do the same. Instructing him to hide the lamp and get rid of it later. Taking him by the collar like a scared puppy and commanding him to return to the party like nothing was wrong. Most of all, Emmy would remember that in the heat of themoment, when it mattered the most, he had turned weak and she had turned strong.
All he could do was nod, a single tear falling tremulously down his cheek. He wasn’t even brave enough to say the word out loud.
She, on the other hand, was brave. Capable of so much more than the world had ever given her credit for. She would show them.
She brought the lamp down with all her might on Georgia’s head.
Chapter 40Frances, the Academic
PRESENT DAY
“Franny, take my hand!”
Frances Vogel seized Melissa’s outstretched fingers, laughing as the taller girl yanked her through the crowd to where the other members of their cohort waited, right behind a blockade that protected the stage. Franny had never been to a protest before, and now here she was in front of the gleaming white obelisk of city hall, in the beating heart of a rally that had turned out to be so much bigger than she’d expected.
She pushed her wire-frame glasses up her nose, thankful she hadn’t been vain and tried to wear her contacts, because all the kicked-up grit from the streets surely would’ve made her eyes irritated and bloodshot. She’d walked around soaking up every detail: the hilarious outfits, the chanting and singing, the joyous people linking arms, the crowd that stretched so far, she’d seen in aerial photos on Instagram that they blanketed most of Downtown. NBC4 was estimating more than seventy thousand people had shown up.
Seventythousand. Franny was a historian-in-training. She knew the implications of a number that big.
Beside her, Melissa waved her handmade sign, which readNO REPEATS OF HISTORY: KEEP DEMAGOGUES OUT OF THE OVAL!Franny and her friends had designed their signs together last night, using paint markers she’d splurged on for the occasion, and then they’d had a sleepover at her apartment, treating the rally like she used to treat childhood birthday parties. At dawn they’d lathered on sunscreen, packed their water bottles and little sheets of paper titled “Know Your Rights” the ACLU had handed out on campus, and taken the busto Downtown. When they discovered they were some of the first to arrive, they couldn’t stop laughing. How typical for five academic researchers to try so hard, wanting A-pluses on their first rally.
“Look, it’s Luca!” Melissa jumped and thrust her finger at the stage as Luca Clearwater strode across it in her signature sharp suit. City hall loomed directly behind her, as if the face of the government itself were watching.
Franny joined the thousands chanting Luca’s name. Electric anticipation sizzled in the air, making her giddy. She and her cohort, all first-year PhD students at UCLA, were obsessed with Luca. She was a badass, a role model—a woman only a little older than them who spoke truth to power in ways Franny hoped to do with her own work. The number of videos she and her friends had exchanged of Luca taking down one wannabe despot after another was extraordinary, so when they heard she was planning a rally, attending was a given.
“My god.Lookat you, Los Angeles!” Luca’s image was magnified across each of the huge screens set up throughout Downtown, a hundred Lucas on a hundred stages. She had to pause to wait for the shouting to die down. “The news is saying over seventy thousand of you are standing here right now. Can you believe that? I’d say we’re showing the democratic tradition is alive and well in America, don’t you think?”
Melissa turned to Franny and gripped her arm, eyes luminous with excitement. As students of history, they understood the power of watching it unfold. Franny had loved the subject since she was a girl—and growing up with two professor parents, there’d been no question that she’d follow in their footsteps. Over the course of the next six years, Franny would earn her PhD and try her luck in the job market, even though her own professors had warned that academia was dying, academics slowly going extinct, and the odds of any of the grad students in their cohort becoming anything more than an adjunct—a glorified gig worker—were terrifyingly low. But Franny had always been a dreamer. Even if she never experienced the joy of steady health care, she longed to publish books that would shape other people’s thinking as much as her favorite history books had shaped hers.
Luca paced the stage, listing reasons voters should reject Knox forpresident, and unexpected tears filled Franny’s eyes.Yes, she wanted to shout back.No more authoritarians. Remind the world we already know how that story goes!
