Page 13 of Gorgeous Misery

She takes off her sunglasses to look me in the eyes for this part. “Adam said something to me when we talked on the phone and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said… if I help him, he will give me a secret. But I need to be very, very sure I want that secret. Because…” She shrugs. “I dunno.”

“It’s something bad?” I ask.

“Of course it’s bad.” She scoffs. “But he didn’t have to say that to me. Ya know? He didn’t have to and he did.”

“So he wants to tell you the secret, but he doesn’t want to be responsible for the fallout.”

“Exactly.”

“And even though you know damn well you should let this go, you can’t.”

“I can’t,” she admits.

“What do you think it is?”

Her eyes go distant for a moment. Like she’s picturing something in her head. Then they refocus on me. “I think it’s Nick.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it has something to do with Nick.”

“But why do you say that?”

“Because he’s the only one who could ever hurt me. And whatever secret Adam has, it’s going to hurt me.”

I consider this in silence for a moment. Nick Tate. He’s the Ghost of Company Past. The sacrifice so that we could live these good, calm, easy poolside lives.

I’ve heard rumors over the years too. Rather, I’ve seen rumors. There’s a chat board where guys like me like to hang out to get news of things most people don’t want to talk about. It’s the details. The behind-the-scenes kinda shit. The up-close-and-personal.

Hell, most people don’t even want to know about ordinary stuff. They want to live their lives. They want to work their jobs. They want to raise their kids. They want to eat out at restaurants, they want to watch live bands, and stream TV, and go on socials. They want to take vacations, and make plans for the future.

They do not want to know what the people who run this world are doing to it. They don’t even wanna know what those people think of them.

That’s all inside baseball, as they say. It’s minutiae. Detailed inner workings that affect almost no one directly, so almost no one cares about it.

But the people who hang out on this chat board are the definition of inside baseball. And these guys on the board—it’s all anonymous. You’re not allowed to have a name on these platforms. You’re no one. Or rather, you are what you post. If you post bullshit, you’re full of shit. If you post new facts, you’re a good digger. But if you can draw straight lines between things across weeks, or months, or better yet, decades? You don’t need a name to get respect. You’ve got rank. For an hour or two, at least.

I’ve toned my participation down a lot over the years. Sometimes I only visit the boards once a month. But when shit happens, I’m on there dozens of times a day trying to put the pieces together just like everyone else.

There was an incident a couple years ago that got a lot of attention on the boards so I made it a point to lurk. The incident was actually the sudden death of hundreds of elites. Billionaires and their entire families suddenly died. Not all the same way. At least, that’s not how it was reported. Some of them suicided. Some of them were in a plane crash, boat crash, weird hiking incident. Others died of an illness. How they died didn’t matter because it was all lies. The point was—they were dead. Entire families just wiped out. The board called this operation the Purge. And it had Company written all over it so I was following every fucking detail back then. Over the years I lost interest in the board, but I kept up my diligent lurking. And it paid off a few months back when his name suddenly popped up.

Nick Tate.

Back when he was killed—rather, back when Sasha killed him—there was a lot of chatter about us. All of us. Even me. But it died down to an almost imperceptible whimper because all that happened almost a decade ago now.

But then, during the Purge, there he was. And the people on this board, maybe they didn’t know him, but they knew of him. And they were intrigued.

It should go without saying that grabbing the attention of anonymous posters on a board like this is a bad thing.

Here’s how it works on the board:

All information posted is public. There is no hacking happening on this site. There is no leaking of hacked information, either. That’s illegal and if you want to keep your anonymous operation going in plain sight like this and not be relegated back to the depths of the dark web, you keep it all legal.

So these anonymous posters, they wait for some nugget of information to be leaked—on purpose or by mistake—onto socials or in the news. Then they pick it apart. They find connections. And lots of times—not always, but lots of times—they even find the truth.