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  ‘Fuck. We have something here. This is important.’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s not.’ Jane rubbed her eyes but her mascara didn’t budge; it wouldn’t dare, Sam thought. ‘But that’s not the issue. I’m trying to explain, if you would just—’

  ‘I don’t want to get into ego here.’ Sam threw the cushion aside and curled one foot under her, picking at the black polish on the other big toe. ‘I’m just the vessel. I know I’m not important but the message is important. These labels we put on ourselves and our sexuality are so binary and we need—’

  ‘What you need to do is to take a minute,’ Jane interrupted her. ‘What would you tell me if I was spiralling like this? Wouldn’t you say that I should turn it over to my Higher Power or some shit?’

  ‘Not now, Jane,’ she snapped. ‘I’m a human being having a human experience and I need to honour my truth. And my truth is that I feel really upset. I can’t believe Lisa is throwing a hissy fit over a stupid essay. We’re not in high school any more.’ She bent down to the coffee table to grab the small, gold buddha she’d bought on a silent retreat in Chiang Mai and cradled it in her lap, rubbing its belly for luck. She breathed in, counting to four, and she breathed out, asking her spirit guides to show her the way through this. When she opened her eyes, Jane was watching her warily. ‘I want to apologize,’ Sam said. Such behaviour was beneath her, they both knew that. ‘I shouldn’t have snapped at you, that was unacceptable. Everything about Lisa … it makes me a little crazy, I guess.’ She waited. ‘Jane?’ she asked when her manager didn’t say anything.

  ‘There’s something else,’ the other woman said. ‘I’m not sure how to say this to you but …’

  ‘What is it?’ Sam clutched the buddha so tightly that her knuckles turned white. ‘Did she say it didn’t happen? Did she actually deny this?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ her manager replied. ‘Lisa isn’t denying it happened. But she says she remembers it differently.’ Jane took a deep breath. ‘She said what happened between the two of you … Sam, I think she’s claiming it was sexual assault.’

  3.

  If you had asked Sam where she was in the moments after Jane told her about Lisa’s allegation, she would say she knew she was in her apartment, the pre-war building on the Upper West Side with a view of the river from the rooftop. Jane was there, mouthing words that Sam couldn’t seem to hear because she wasn’t in her body any more, she realized; she couldn’t feel her feet on the ground and her hands were clutching at the fabric of the sofa, as if to prevent herself from floating away. She felt so light, like she was dissolving to air. She was dimly aware of Jane wrapping a blanket around her, a Scottish tweed that smelled of her favourite perfume. Her manager sitting beside her, saying, ‘We’re gonna figure this out, Sam, I promise.’ She wasn’t sure of how long they sat there together in silence, how long it took for her to stop shaking, for the tectonic plates of her brain to slot back into place and for her to come back to herself, folding into her body again. Jane fumbled in her satchel, groaning. ‘This was a bad week to give up smoking, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It’s gross and it’s eating your lungs,’ Sam said automatically. She shrugged the blanket off. ‘Forward Lisa’s email to me. I want to read it myself.’

  The message was rambling, littered with typos.

  I just read your essay in blackout I cant believe you would write this about me. I’m mortified. You can’t jsut say things like this. I’m a mother now. I have two girls. I cant have them reading something like this. How could you? It was private sam what happened. you shouldn’t have done this. That night …, I didn’t want that to happen. I’m not like that. but when Sam wants something, it happens whether you want it or not. you just did it anyway didn’t you? It didn’t matter how i felt. You just took what you wanted without my consent.

  Sam looked up from the iPhone, dizzy, and for a moment she thought she was going to pass out. ‘Oh my god,’ she said. ‘She’s implying that I …’ She let the cell phone drop from her fingers as she lay down on the sofa, wrapping her arms around her head. She always told her girls it was important to cry, it was cathartic, but now, when she needed it most, she found it almost impossible to do so and she shook with the effort of trying to let go.

  Jane waited until Sam was still, when the brittle sobs had stopped shuddering down her spine. ‘Are you ready?’ her manager said. ‘Because we need to get our game plan together.’

  They talked into the early hours of the morning, turning her apartment into a war-room. ‘I don’t understand,’ Sam said, pulling strands of her hair out and letting them shimmer to the ground. ‘I don’t understand why she’d say something like this; it doesn’t make any sense.’ She looked at Jane. ‘Why would she say this?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But why would she lie about something like this? Why would—’

  ‘OK,’ Jane cut her off. ‘You’ve asked me that at least ten times. I get this is a shock but we need to focus. What are our options?’

  ‘What do you mean, options?’

  ‘We need to make this go away, before it becomes an actual problem. I suppose you could offer to write a retraction to the essay but it would hurt book sales.’ The other woman winced at the thought. ‘And it’ll damage your credibility, long term.’

  ‘Book sales? I’ve basically just been accused of sexual assault and you’re worrying about book sales?’

  ‘Yeah, well, this is where I earn my fifteen per cent.’ Jane was calm, cracking her chopsticks in two and fishing some shrimp out of the takeout box she’d ordered at midnight, when it became clear she wouldn’t be going home any time soon. ‘I know this is upsetting, but it’s my job to worry about things like that.’

  Sam picked up her phone, scanning through the email again. ‘You know, there’s something not quite right about this. All these mistakes, that’s not like Lisa. She was an honour roll student, she was … Do you think she’s OK?’

  ‘This is gonna sound heartless but I don’t give a fuck. There’s too much at stake here.’ Jane stared into her Kung Pao intently, avoiding Sam’s gaze. ‘Have you thought about how this might jeopardize the Shakti sale?’

  ‘It wouldn’t.’ She felt herself go cold. ‘We’re so close and Teddy has my back; he promised he’d take care of me.’

  ‘He isn’t the only investor. At the end of the day, there are millions of dollars at stake here. If the board decides you’re a liability, Teddy’s hands will be tied.’

  ‘Shit,’ she swore. Sam hadn’t been convinced, in the beginning, that going public was the right choice for Shakti, but when Jane told her how much money she would get as a pay-out, Sam had gone quiet. With a deal that big, there was a real possibility she might get a Forbes magazine cover, one which described her as a mogul, a genius. Everyone in her hometown would read it. Lisa would too, and more importantly, so would Josh. She couldn’t lose this deal, not now. ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’ Sam covered her eyes with her hands. ‘This is so unfair. I’m a good person. I don’t deserve this.’

  ‘Stop panicking,’ Jane said. ‘It’s only an email right now, no one knows anything about it except us. We have time to fix it.’ Her manager hesitated. ‘I’m going to ask you this question just once and I need you to be totally honest with me,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Did you do it?’

  Sam inhaled sharply. ‘Are you for real? I’m a survivor myself, I would never do something like this.’ All the nights she’d awoken from a sweating nightmare, convinced she could feel those hands on her body again, breaking her in two. The sound of their laughter as she fell back under, limbs flailing. It was the same time, every night – the body keeps the score, her therapist reminded her – and afterwards, as Sam tried to find sleep again, she would think – I bet their bodies don’t remember. I bet they sleep through the night easily. ‘I can’t believe you’d even ask me that, Jane. Have you ever known me to lie?’

  ‘No,’ her manager admitted. It had often been a bone of
contention between them, Sam’s refusal to promote a product she didn’t believe in, or give a quote for a book she didn’t love, telling the other woman that her integrity could not be bought. ‘But what’s Lisa’s motivation for doing this, then?’ Jane made a face at the food, slopping the carton down on the coffee table. ‘She could have just said it was an invasion of privacy and insisted Blackout take the essay down – why bring consent into it?’

  ‘I don’t …’ Sam felt like her brain was short-circuiting, a childlike voice in her head whining it’s not fair, it’s not fair on repeat. ‘Maybe it’s because of Josh?’ she tried. ‘He hates me, and I doubt he was thrilled with the essay, he would—Oh shit.’ She leaned back on the sofa, the blood draining from her face. ‘Shit. I know why she’s doing this. In the interview—’

  Her manager started to ask, ‘Which interview?’ because there had been so many in the week leading up to publication, but Sam cut her off.

  ‘The one in Blackout,’ she said impatiently. ‘The one I gave to accompany the essay. I said in my next book I was going to touch on the ultimate taboo. Something I’d never talked about before, not even in Willing Silence.’

  ‘You mean abortion?’ Jane frowned. For years, they’d gone back and forth on the wisdom of Sam declaring herself to be pro-choice. Sam argued that one in four young American women terminated pregnancies, the sort of young women who were in her audience, but her manager had been reluctant, wary of alienating her Red State fans. ‘Why on earth would you say that to a journalist without running it past me first?’

  ‘I was exhausted,’ Sam protested. ‘I was just off the red-eye from London and it was my fifth interview that morning. The woman asked what my next book was about and I couldn’t think of anything else to tell her. It just came out.’

  ‘You’re too long at this game for mistakes like that.’ Jane shook her head. ‘And why would Lisa care if you wrote about being pro-choice, anyway? What’s it got to do with her?’

  ‘Quite a lot, actually. I swore to Lisa I’d never tell that story.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Sam raised an eyebrow at her manager, watching as comprehension dawned on the other woman’s face. ‘Because it wasn’t really my story to tell.’

  4.

  She watched as Jane gathered her things, wishing she could ask her manager to stay. Please, she begged silently. Please, don’t leave me here alone. Jane stood, staring down at Sam. ‘Go to Bennford in the morning,’ she said. ‘Whatever childhood drama you and Lisa have going on, it doesn’t matter any more. You need to make sure that email doesn’t get out. You’re one of the most charming women I’ve ever met,’ Jane said, but it didn’t sound like a compliment. ‘Now is the time to use those infamous powers of persuasion. Fix this before it becomes an actual problem.’

  Her manager left and Sam was alone with her expensive, beautiful things, the smell of Chinese food hanging heavy in the air. The fear was dark water and she was shoulder-deep in it, tasting the rising tide. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ she said out loud, the words echoing in the empty apartment. ‘I’m a good person.’ She slumped to the floor, whispering, ‘I’m a good person,’ over and over. She needed someone here, somehow, to hold her and tell her everything would be OK, but she could not think of one person she trusted enough to tell this story to. I am alone, she thought. I am so alone.

  Before writing Chaste, she would have gone out and found a man to go home with, to feel his skin against hers for long enough that she could pretend she was happy. But she couldn’t do that any more, so she went to bed and the bad thoughts were like dandelion seeds scattering through the air, too many to count and impossible to retrieve. She thought of the email and she thought about what would happen were this to go public, the things people would say about her. She thought about that night and every other night she and Lisa had spent together – had she held her friend’s hand too long? Had she accidentally touched Lisa in her sleep, and somehow not been aware of it? – picking through the rubble of their friendship to find the shrapnel, the wounds Lisa was claiming Sam had inflicted upon her. She was so afraid and her fear made monsters of the shadows, moving slowly towards her, and after an hour or so she got up, frantically searching through the washbags from her last European tour until she found the half-empty bottle of melatonin, swallowing two tablets without water.

  She woke at 6 a.m., her mouth dry and her nightdress damp with sweat, fragments of strange, uncanny dreams breaking apart in her hands. After she showered, she knelt at her prayer altar and attempted to do a heart-opening meditation but she couldn’t find stillness; not in the way in which she was accustomed to anyway, the calm blossoming in her lungs as she welcomed herself home. Today, all she could focus on was Lisa. Lisa’s words, Lisa’s email, the implication within. She couldn’t stop playing out the worst-case scenarios – a Twitter pile-on, furious calls for cancellation. Her good name destroyed. Shakti closing down, her girls bereft, floundering without her guidance – and finally she kicked the blanket off her knees in frustration and phoned her therapist, using the private number Diane only gave to her ‘special’ clients. Sam waited in her office for the Zoom meeting to start, and as she pushed her chair back, she stared at the shelves lined above her desk. All the foreign editions of her first memoir, translated into thirty-seven languages around the world, a number one bestseller in most territories. A poster of the Willing Silence movie, its iconic shot of a young, blonde girl hiding under a single bed, a hand clasped over her mouth and a lone tear rolling down her cheek. There was a photograph of Sam with the production team on Oscar night, Anne Hathaway in a frothing tulle gown, cradling her statue for Best Actress as if it were a newborn baby. The New York Times bestseller list, cut out and framed, proof that she had, at one point, been the writer of the bestselling book in the whole country. You are a success, Sam told herself. No one can take that away from you.

  ‘We’ve been doing this work together for years, Diane. You know me better than anyone else. Do you think I would have sex with someone without their consent?’ Sam squinted at her therapist through the computer screen. Her eyes were tired from the lack of sleep, and the glare was irritating them. ‘I—’ She took a breath, steadying herself. ‘I’m not capable of doing something like this, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘What I know is this,’ the older woman replied in her crisp, New England accent. ‘We are all capable of being moral and monstrous, given the right circumstances. It does us no service to try and hide from our shadow selves.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sam didn’t have the patience for a lecture from Diane on the dangers of binary thinking today, not with everything else she was going through. ‘I’m aware of that. I’ve been through the programme. I’ve done the twelve steps, I’ve made amends to all those I hurt. I know I’ve made mistakes, but don’t you think it might have come up in our sessions before now if I had assaulted someone?’

  ‘Samantha.’ Diane tilted her head, visibly reluctant to appease her. Sam had seen many therapists over the years and she’d always prided herself on her ability to outsmart them, playing Chicken to see who would swerve first. They were either in awe of her success or impressed by it, saying how honoured they were to have her in their therapy rooms, sit, sit, make yourself comfortable! But Diane had no time for such games; she was one of the few people in her life who was disinterested in Samantha’s charm, who seemed wary of it, in fact. She had pushed Sam to see how her need to ‘mesmerize’ every person she met played out in her friendships – how Sam kept people at a distance, afraid they would see beyond the dazzling charisma and be disappointed – and with the men she dated, too. It was Diane who’d first suggested Sam was not just a drug addict, but that her attitude to love and relationships might need exploration too. ‘I’m curious,’ the therapist had asked during one of their early sessions. ‘Why do you feel the need to have sex with every man who will have you?’

  ‘We both know memory is a delicate thing,’ Diane said now. ‘And while yes,
it seems unlikely that the woman I know from our work together would commit such an act’ – she held up a hand to stop her client from celebrating at this rare concession – ‘don’t you think it can also be true that Lisa might remember that night otherwise?’

  ‘Please! There’s a difference between blanking on what dress you wore to prom and forgetting you’re a sexual predator.’

  ‘Samantha …’

  ‘I didn’t do this.’ She slapped her palm on the desk, her skin smarting in response. ‘Do you have any idea how scary it is, that someone could just say something like this and you’ve no way of proving they’re lying? After everything I’ve gone through …’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Diane sighed, taking her glasses off and cleaning the lenses. ‘This must be especially difficult for you, given your own history of sexual trauma.’ She tsked in sympathy. ‘You’ve been such a leading voice in this sector, too. Many of my clients reference your work; how helpful your disclosure of rape was during their own recovery. You should be proud of that, Samantha.’

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘But last night, when Jane left … I was sitting there, staring at my phone, and I realized I had no one to call. You’re the only person I trust, Diane, and I have to pay you, for Chrissake.’

  ‘What about Tatum? She’s supposed to be your closest friend.’

  Sam had met Tatum at a Yoga to the People class in the fall of 2009. She’d spotted someone in the front row with a red ponytail, pale arms covered in freckles, and she’d almost called out, Lisa, is that you? before she caught herself. Afterwards, she’d rushed to introduce herself, invited the other woman to join her for a green smoothie, and they’d been best friends ever since. But Sam wouldn’t tell Tatum about this.

  ‘Did you consider calling her?’ Diane continued. ‘We’ve talked about the importance of allowing people in.’