Frank has Lulu and hands the dog to Dani.
“Where’s your broom?”
“I’ll do it, Frank. I’m sure Mom needs you back.”
He nods once.
“Dani, what the fuck?” I whisper at her after he’s gone out the door and I made sure he was in the elevator and counted to a hundred. “What the literalfuck?”
“I wanted to hear what he was saying! Does he know?” she hisses.
“He didn’t know, but he’s suspicious. And you made him even more suspicious!”
“I’m sorry! Look, I think we need a contingency plan.” She pulls out her notebook, on which she has written KIDNAPPING CONTINGENCY PLANS.
“Dani, no.” I rip the page out of the notebook then rip out several more after that and rush to the kitchen, where I start boiling water. “We cannot write anything down. We need a plan. We need to get our story straight.”
“I think we say it was a weird kink thing,” she says in a rush.
“If there are other video angles—especially ones with sound—we are fucked. I am fucked. You don’t understand Frank, okay? He’s not going to let this go.”
“He’s retired, isn’t he?”
“He was this close”—I pinch two of my fingers together—“to catching Stuart. Even if Grayson hadn’t tricked Dad and Stuart into letting him out to go to that baseball game, Frank was going to find Stuart in the next week or so. He was his number-one suspect. Everyone else in the FBI, the police, all of them—they had given up years ago, but not Frank. He doesn’t give up. He’s going to find out.”
I dump water into a blender then stuff the paper in and set it to pulverize.
“He might not find out,” Dani says, chewing on her lip. “There weren’t any cars passing us. I remember, I was looking for them.”
“It’s the twenty-first century. There are cameras everywhere.”
“We were on a commercial street,” she says, stroking my arm. “And actually there are fewer cameras than you think. Companies don’t want the liability.”
“Frank’s going to want to know why I didn’t come clean.”
“I’ll take the blame—say I had a weird fantasy, you know, play up the spoiled rich-girl angle, that I didn’t want anyone to know. But they won’t find anything. It’s going to be okay. Please, God, let no one know.” Dani lets out a breath.
“Also, in this country? No one wants to make rich people mad. You’re safe.” She laughs nervously. “And besides, if my mom gets wind of this, we’re all dead anyway—including Frank.”
41
DANI
“There’s a video?” Piper’s horrified.
“Shh! Not so loud!”
We’re on the roof deck. It’s freezing cold but not raining. Still, it means we’re the only ones out here. I clutch my quickly cooling cup of office coffee.
“Oh my God.” Piper paces in front of me, arms crossed, as she watches the short clip.
“Graham’s stepfather is getting the FBI involved. The FBI! My mom is going to freak out if I get investigated by the FBI. She’s finally treating me like I’m halfway an adult. If she finds out that Graham and I are—”
“Stockholm syndrome, trauma-bonded, dom-sub kink—”
“Okay, you’re just throwing out Archive of Our Own tags now. But yes. She doesn’t even think people who meet online are actually couples. What’s she going to think if I fell in love with my kidnapper?” I’m freaking out.
“It will just blow over in like a week, right? No one else has posted another video, so maybe it will be fine?”
