“Are you trying to say I just gave you the article to get into your pants?”
“No—”
“Because that wasn’t it at all. I respect you as a writer—”
“I know that you do, but still, on some level, the whole thing was fucked up. Don’t you see that?”
He let out a grunt of frustration on the other end of the line. “I think you’re exaggerating a little.” I chewed my lip. He wasn’t admitting it, or he truly wasn’t getting it. I’d wanted to feel that I was special by proving myself to a special man. But maybe I didn’t need to prove anything, and Miles wasn’t that special after all.
“I’m not going to come to your place, because I’m staying with Raf,” I said.
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You’re really screwing me over here, Beckley.”
“I’ll repay the money you gave me. It might take some time, but I will. And in the performance review, you can say what you need to say. Tell them I’m too scared of retaliation to keep going, if that helps. The fact-checker you brought can back you up that there was a fire and shit got dangerous. Now I should go—”
“Did they get to you somehow?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are they blackmailing you, or promising you things? You’re not being yourself.”
“Actually, I think I am,” I said, and hung up.
FIFTY-FIVE
They didn’t come for me that day, or the day after. I waited and waited, expecting them to show up, looking for them around every corner.
There were some news stories about a fire in a West Village building, which burned entirely to the ground. No one was hurt, and it didn’t spread. The building, an old one, hadn’t been up to code, a tinderbox just waiting for a spark to set it ablaze. And still no one came for me, no cops wanting to question me about arson, no mysterious beautiful women ready to plunge a knife in my back.
At random moments, I smelled the flames again. How many people knew what I had done? Had Margot told the whole coven, had word gotten around to all the members, to the staff? Oh God, in my burn-it-all-down impulse, I hadn’t even thought about the fact that I might be putting people out of a job. A sinking feeling of guilt took up residence next to the fear in the pit of my stomach.
• • •
A few nights later, I was working in the bar. Raf was going to stop by at the end of my shift to pick me up since I was nervous about retaliation, about walking in the dark by myself. Together, Raf and I would go back to his place, which, at least for the moment, was my place too. I was going to start looking for a (probably shithole) apartment soon—living together immediately was not a great way to start off a relationship—but, God, it felt nice to be around him all the time, to kiss him good-night and wake up next to him. Nice, and also terrifying.
At eleven p.m., the regulars were still going strong, but the rush was over. I stretched my neck, rolling my head from side to side. The door swung open and I looked up, nearly dropping the glass I was holding when I registered the identity of the new patrons: Margot and Caroline. I briefly considered ducking out the back. But, no, I needed to hear what they had to say. So I braced myself as they looked around the bar, something strange like trepidation on their faces.
They spotted me and made their way over to the bar in front of my station. They were far from the bar’s usual clientele, and the regulars stared accordingly. One older man wolf-whistled at Margot as she walked by, and she stopped right next to him, whispering something in his ear. His face dropped and, chastened, he went back to watching the game with his buddies. Caroline took a tissue out of her purse and cleaned off the barstool before sitting down on it, so as not to ruin her tailored gray skirt. The two women settled themselves and looked up at me in silence.
My heart pounded. “Are you here to hex me off the face of the Earth?” I asked.
“We considered it,” Caroline said. “Especially when I found out that the insurance company was going to deny my claim because the roof wasn’t up to fire code, so your actions are going to be costing me hundreds of thousands of dollars—”
Margot put her hand on top of Caroline’s. “But then we thought about the men coming up the stairs. I saw the way that one of them started moving toward you, when you came out of the building, so I looked up pictures of the New York Standard’s staff, and we put two and two together.”
“I guess Margot was right,” Caroline said. “That in the end, we could trust you after all.”
“I didn’t do it just to destroy the evidence, you know,” I said quietly. “You were fucked, doing things the way you were, and I thought that if it was all gone, you could start fresh. Start better.”
“It’s funny, we talked about that,” Caroline said. “Once we got over the shock of losing so much, of course.”
“We’ve been talking pretty nonstop over the last few days,” Margot said. “About everything, including how to move forward with Nevertheless. Caroline made a very detailed chart of the possibilities.”
“It was a normal amount of details,” Caroline said, and Margot smiled at her. Caroline smiled back. In the background, the bar hubbub raged, but there was a new calmness between the two of them.
“The conclusion that we came to,” Margot said, “is that Nevertheless, as it was, is
