But Caroline saw it differently.
All she ever wanted was their friendship, or so she had convinced herself. Jessica never had been a good friend, a point that was hammered home not too long ago when Jessica so rudely threw her out of her house. Caroline only wanted to be a good friend, so that’s why she went to warn Jessica that her nearly-ex-husband was fooling around with Sarah Miller.
Had Jessica been grateful to hear the news? No, she’d started screaming like a maniac and had thrown her out.
The rejection still stung.
And it hadn’t been the first time, either.
For more than twenty years, Jessica had acted like she was better than Caroline and treated her like dirt, and Caroline wasn’t going to take it anymore. Despite spreading often untrue rumors, Caroline easily convinced herself she was the victim, and that’s why she’d been pressing her sources for any dirt she could dig up on Jessica.
Up until this morning, the rumors were all good news. She heard that Jessica and Todd might be getting back together, a thought that just made her stew with frustration. So she kept digging.
That morning, she finally hit gold.
It happened at yoga class at the Sweet Valley Gym. She had been doing downward dog next to her friend Amy Dent, who also worked as a clerk at the Imagine Hotel. They’d both bonded in the class, being the only women in there who weren’t size sixes.
Amy bragged about seeing Liam O’Connor, People’s Sexiest Import, with a mystery woman recently at the hotel. After class, she’d even shown Caroline a picture she’d snapped on her phone.
That’s when Caroline saw her prayers had been answered. Liam hadn’t been with just anybody. The girl with him was none other than Jessica Wakefield.
There they were, standing together, waiting for the elevator that would take them to his room. She looked a little tipsy, as she leaned against him for support. They were cozy, to say the least.
But the juiciest bits came next.
“I snuck up to the room, which is a big no-no,” Amy had confided to Caroline. “But I was going to ask if he might need anything, except that when I got to the room, I didn’t even knock because I heard…” She leaned forward and continued in a whispered hush. “Some serious sex. These two? Let’s just say…they weren’t shy.”
That was the quote Caroline planned to put in bold in her blog entry.
Now, she clacked happily at her keyboard. Outside, darkness fell. Tonight was Jessica’s big MeanGreen gala, she’d heard about that, too. Well, here would be a nice little exclamation point on the end of that evening, she thought.
Jessica and Todd back together? Not when this news hit the blogosphere. Caroline only wished she could actually see Jessica’s face when she read this. Maybe then she’d finally be sorry.
She decided then and there that when she was done with the blog entry, she’d e-mail Todd the link. Caroline wasn’t going to sit around and hope Todd heard about it. She was going to make sure he did.
After all, that’s only what a good friend would do.
Chapter Seven
Just as Annie Whitman sat down in the courtroom her phone lit up with a text from Jessica.
CALL ME AS SOON AS YOU CAN. IT’S ABOUT BRUCE. WE NEED YOU.
She’d been waiting for this call ever since word of the scandal broke. The Bruce Patman case was right in her line of expertise. It was a case she was itching to handle. And now that she had moved up from San Diego to Sweet Valley, this was just the front-page trial that could shoot her right up to junior partner.
She glanced over at Doug, one of the three named partners in the firm Leisten, Hartke & White, the biggest defense firm in Southern California, and thought she still should be pinching herself that she was working for the biggest and best firm in Los Angeles. Leisten, Hartke & White always landed the most important cases. Granted, she had been known as the best defense lawyer in San Diego. Doug had practically pleaded with her to join the firm. Still, she couldn’t help feeling a little nervous today, her first time in the courtroom in Sweet Valley. Her hometown could do that.
Today Annie was representing the starlet who’d been sued by a member of the paparazzi for running over his foot in her Maserati.
“You’ll do great,” Doug told Annie, and smiled.
Annie took a deep breath. She tried not to think about the last time she’d stood in a courtroom before a judge. She hadn’t been a lawyer at all, but a plaintiff.
That was six months ago, when she divorced Charlie Markus, her husband of seven years.
Charlie had been her high school sweetheart, the boy who helped her turn her life around. Without him in her life, she thought, she never would’ve finished law school. Or become one of San Diego’s best defense attorneys.
He convinced her she knew how to defend people—to find in them what needed defending. She’d done it for herself her whole life, ever since she’d had to defend her reputation in high school. “Easy Annie,” they’d called her. But not anymore.
She gave Charlie credit for that.
But something shifted during the course of their marriage, though Annie couldn’t say exactly when. At some point, Charlie ceased to be the optimistic and loving boy who believed in her and became a bitter, vindictive man who blamed her for everything wrong in his life.
Charlie used to be the one to tell Annie that things weren’t so bad. That was before he’d spent twelve years trying—and failing—to get one of his four novels published.
While his career floundered, hers flourished. She earned promotion after promotion; he got stuck with boring freelance
