“How dare you,” she said, coming straight for Anders. Piper sat up, confused. Pearl kept her blazing eyes glued on Anders and didn’t stop moving until her whisk was inches from Anders’s face.
Anders pressed himself into the back of the couch as far as he could, his palms facing forward in a don’t shoot motion. He eyed the whisk. Don’t swat.
“Mrs. Olecki?” Piper said, bewildered, but Pearl didn’t even glance her way.
“Good Morning America called!” she said, and Anders sat stunned for a beat that they hadn’t waited like he’d asked them to. And then flooded with relief. That was what this was all about? Granted, it wasn’t the ideal way to introduce the information to Piper, but he was coming to tell her anyway, and now he could explain. “It’s about you, Piper,” Pearl spat out, as if the words tasted bad in her mouth. “His little podcast has nothing to do with global warming—and everything to do with you and Tom.”
Piper turned her head slowly until she was looking fully at Anders, her eyes wide, cheeks still wet with tears. “Is that true?”
“Yes, but—”
The parallel lines in Piper’s forehead deepened, her brow furrowed. “You lied to me? You’ve been lying to me this entire time?”
“Well, technically yes, but—”
“And Good Morning America . . .” He could nearly see the wheels in her head turning, as she made sense of it all. “I thought you said you only had, like, four listeners.”
“Well, it’s increased slightly—I told you it was doing better.”
“How much better is better?”
Anders mumbled the number quietly.
“I can’t hear you.”
“A little more than one million.”
“ONE MILLION PEOPLE!”
“Give or take.”
“You’ve been blabbing all the details of my personal life to one million people without telling me, without my permission, so that, what . . . you could be some famous podcaster?”
When she put it like that, Anders’s confidence faltered and shame started to flood his veins. His mind raced, trying to figure out how to explain so that it sounded less horrible, but he couldn’t—because that was exactly what he’d done. Piper straightened her spine, her entire body going as stiff as it had been limp just minutes before. She pointed to the door. “Get. Out.”
“Piper, please,” he said, the positive aspects of this horrible thing he’d done slowly coming back to him. “I was coming here to tell you. This could actually be a good thing—”
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!” Piper screamed so loud, the silence afterward hung in the air like a presence. Her eyes were on fire, her entire body vibrating with anger.
And Anders had no choice but to leave, Mrs. Olecki following a step behind him, with her whisk poised and at the ready.
—
“I knew it! I knew that boy was up to no good,” Pearl fumed later that evening to Harold, over their dinner of cod stew and corn bread. She’d been repeating some variation of that sentence, sometimes muttering it, sometimes shouting it to the air, all afternoon. “What a slimy, good-for-nothing, dishonest . . . journalist. And to think we let him stay under our roof! Fed him, even. We housed the enemy, that’s what we did, Harold.” Harold wasn’t sure that was an accurate assessment, but he knew better than to contradict his wife when she was on a tirade.
Instead he took a thoughtful bite of his corn bread, swallowed, and then said: “Business sure does seem to be picking up. Maybe next summer we’ll finally be able to put a new roof on the house, huh?”
Pearl narrowed her eyes at him. “I know exactly what you’re doing. You think just because some little bit of good came out of his lying, backstabbing betrayal, I should just forgive and forget. Well, I will not do it. The way he lied to us all right to our faces and hurt Piper! As if that girl hasn’t been through enough. I should just cancel all those reservations! That’s what I should do. It’s blood money! That’s what it is.”
But Harold knew she wouldn’t do that either. His wife might be overly opinionated and particularly fond of Piper and prone to dramatic angry outbursts—but she was also quite a shrewd businesswoman.
He dug into his stew and blew on a steaming spoonful, as Pearl carried on in her dismantling of Anders and his character, and was glad for the boy’s sake that he was only on the receiving end of her invective in theory and not in person.
—
Back at his apartment Anders stood—stunned—at what a turn of events the day had taken. Tom’s body had been found! And while Piper was trying to process her grief over that, Pearl had to butt her nose in and complicate matters—adding to Piper’s overwhelming heartache for no good reason. But eventually the shock melted into shame and self-pity, as he knew he had no one but himself to blame. There were so many times he could have explained himself to Piper—prevented her from finding out in the way she just did—and he had chosen not to. He let fear of her reaction stand in the way, only to all but guarantee the terrible reaction this afternoon with his continued dishonesty. He jammed the pad of his pointer finger onto the numbers on his phone screen, dialing the producer at Good Morning America and leaving a message that he would not be appearing on the show after all. Then he hung up and stood in the center of the room, staring at his podcast equipment.
Glaring at it, really, as if the equipment itself had gotten him into this mess. The urge to swipe it all off the metal table in one swift motion and watch it fall to the floor in a satisfying
