World-class skier “JonJon” Rittenberg says claims of sexual assault are “all lies” and “it never happened.”
The camera pans back to Ben. “I’d callthatironic justice.”
“Or karma,” Judy says with a smile.
Kat’s mind wheels back to the night she posed as Mia and lured Jon up to the Airbnb she cleaned. She’d kissed him and been repulsed by it. But anger kept her going. After Jon passed out, Boon—using gloves—coated Jon’s penis with a sticky substance he had brought with him, and he rubbed Icy Hot medicated muscle pain-relief cream around Jon’sanal area. That stuff burns like all hell when it touches private parts. Kat wanted the psychological—gaslighting—effects. She wanted to sow doubt in Jon’s head. She wanted him to fret about what really happened on a deeply personal and sexual level. She wanted Jon to feel violated, to know firsthand what the women he abused might experience.
Boon also brought a friend of his, and they did their theatrical thing, posing with Jon while he lay drugged and naked on the bed. Kat took photos. They all left. Boon went to wait in his car across the street until Jon woke and came stumbling out of the building.
Kat doesn’t feel good about that night. But Jon and other men like him do this sort of thing to women on a daily basis. Always have and probably always will. And they brush it off withShe Wanted It. She’s Lying. She Was Drunk.
It Never Happened.
And the world moves on.
Unless we take a stand. Unless we show them how a victim feels.
“Hey,” says a guy with an Australian accent.
Kat spins around.
“You look just like her—that maid in the news.”
She smiles. “I get that a lot.”
Kat slides off the bamboo barstool and gathers up her straw bag. She steps out into the sunshine and walks a little way down the beach. Orchids scent the air. The ocean, a deep aqua, stretches to the hazy horizon. Behind her, inland, mist circles brooding volcanoes in the distance. She stops, takes a selfie.
Kat checks it, then loads it to her @foxandcrow profile. She types:
#karmaissublime #waterswarm #comeonin #nextstoppopsvillage
She hits “Share.”
Kat grins as she slips her phone back into her bag. Boon will see it. He’ll know what she means.
The words from the TV show echo in her heart as she walks down the beach.
I’d callthatironic justice.
Or karma.
It never happened.
And it also did happen. Kit murdered her Monster that night. The Trauma Monster that made her hide. That made her become invisible. A ghost.
Now she is seen.
And so are Jon and Daisy.
Karma really is sublime, baby, she thinks as she peels open a red lollipop. She sucks it as she wanders into the low-angled rays of the setting Indonesian sun.
MAL
Mal sips a coffee as she reads the final scanned pages from Kit Darling’s diary. Benoit is across the bullpen, also reading. It’s late afternoon, quiet, and snowing softly outside.
When I first tried to write the HOW IT ENDS part, I had only snatches of a memory. Strands that would come to me in nightmares, wake me in a sweat. They seemed to come from afar, from some hidden interior place that was not really part of me. Almost as though the memories belonged to another person. I wondered if the act of writing it down might coax out the missing parts, the context.
So I started in third person. From a distance. I jotted down snippets. But the more I dug into Daisy and Jon’s life, the deeper I went, and after I found that footage and heard the voices and music and saw again the faces from that night—all the pieces slammed together. I saw the whole picture. It became fleshed. It surfaced in full color.
