Pursued

by Tracy Wolff

  It was the only way she could do it, as far as she could tell. The only way she could write the story and also keep her integrity. Anything else was out of the question.

  Satisfied with her decision—or at least as satisfied as she could be—she skimmed through the rest of the file before pulling out a yellow legal pad and making a list of every question she could think of pertaining to the investigation. It was just a start. She was sure she would come up with a bunch more as she delved into her research. But she needed to start somewhere, and this seemed as good a way to focus her research as any other.

  Always start with the questions, her father used to tell her. How do you know what you’re looking for if you don’t even know what information you’re missing? He’d said that to her a million times when she was young, back when he actually used to come home from his sojourns on the road. Back when he—when they—still had a home for him to come back to.

  Shoving the unpleasant memories away, she dug into the story just as he’d taught her all those years ago. And soon she was so engrossed in her research that she forgot about everything else. It turned out the diamond trade was a fascinating—and brutal—world, one where human lives were often valued much less than the stones they mined.

  She was so riveted by the stories that she didn’t even notice Stephanie stopping by her desk until her friend put her hand on Desi’s arm. Then she nearly jumped through the roof.

  “I’m sorry!” Stephanie laughed when Desi had finally calmed down enough to take a breath. “I just wanted to see if you were ready to go to lunch.”

  “Oh, yeah. Of course. Give me five minutes to get all this in order, if that’s okay.”

  “No problem. Looks like you got a decent story after all.”

  “Looks like. I hope I can do it justice.”

  “Of course you can! You’ll be off the galas and into the news pages in no time.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ears,” Desi told her.

  “Hush! Don’t let Malcolm hear you say that. He’ll think you’re talking about him!”

  They both laughed then, largely because Stephanie was right.

  Desi closed her computer and locked up all of her paper research in her desk. It was early days yet, but it was never too early to be careful with her information. Another lesson her father had taught her before she’d hit her tenth birthday.

  “Ready to go?” she asked after gathering her purse.

  “Absolutely.” But before she could step out from behind her desk, Stephanie leaned closer and whispered, “Actually, I was hoping you had a tampon I could borrow. I always carry a couple in my purse, but for some reason I only had one today and there’s no way I’ll make it through the afternoon without an extra.”

  “Oh, right. Of course. I keep mine in my desk.” Desi turned to open the drawer where she kept her personal stuff and pulled out the box of tampons she’d put in there weeks ago. But as she opened the box, it hit her that it was unopened. As in it had never been opened.

  But that was impossible. She’d brought the box to work eight or nine weeks ago, when she’d used up the last of the old one. How could she have not had a period in the past nine weeks? And, more important, how could she not have noticed? She’d never had the most regular periods, despite being on the pill, but she’d never gone this long without one before, either. Alarm bells should have sounded at one point or another. They were definitely sounding now.

  “Are you okay?” Stephanie asked as she reached out a hand to steady Desi’s suddenly shaky form. “You’ve gone pale.”

  Desi didn’t answer. She was too busy doing the math in her head. And then redoing it. And then redoing it again. But no matter how she looked at it, no matter how she counted, she should have had a period before now. Even worse, if she’d been close to her regular schedule last month, she would have been ovulating right about the time she and Nic had met.

  Her knees gave way at the realization, and she probably would have fallen if Stephanie hadn’t shoved the desk chair under Desi at the last second.

  “Are you okay?” her friend asked again.

  “I don’t know.” The words sounded hoarse as she forced them out of her too-tight throat. It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t possible. She had been on the pill for years. And except for that first time on the balcony, she and Nic had used condoms. Which shouldn’t have mattered in terms of pregnancy because she was on. The. Pill.

  Except…except, she hadn’t had a period. And—she took stock of her body, which felt totally normal except for the low-grade dizziness she’d been fighting for a few days—she had none of the signs that she would soon be getting a period. No cramps. No aching. No spotting. Nothing.

  Nothing but dizziness. Nothing but a missed period. Nothing but—oh, God. Ohgodohgodohgod. For a second she thought she was actually going to have to put her head between her legs.

  “Can you tell me what’s wrong?” Stephanie asked, crouching down beside her. “Are you sick?”

  Desi laughed a little hysterically then. “No, I’m not sick.” And she wasn’t, though she was very afraid that she was going to get sick if she didn’t stave off this dizziness. And since the last thing she wanted to do was throw up in the middle of her office, she started breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth in the same steady rhythm she’d once seen a pregnant professor use.

  It actually worked and in less than a minute she was feeling a lot steadier. At least physically. “Um, maybe you should go to lunch without me,” she told Stephanie as she thrust the whole box of tampons at her. All she could think of was getting to the nearest drugstore and buying a pregnancy test. It would come back negative—of course it would come back negative because she was on the pill—but she needed to see the minus sign. Or the blank box. Or whatever the hell it was she was supposed to see, or not see, to prove to herself that she wasn’t pregnant with Nic Durand’s baby.

  Except something in her wildly erratic behavior must have given her away—could it have been her death grip on the box of unopened tampons?—because Stephanie hauled her gently to her feet. Then whispered softly, “The convenience store on the corner should have a pregnancy test. If you’d like, I can run and get it for you.”

  Desi should have said she was fine, that she appreciated the offer but she could get the pregnancy test herself. Or better yet, she should have pretended that she had no idea what Stephanie was talking about. But the truth was, she was suddenly exhausted and shaky and terrified. So terrified. The last thing she wanted to do at that moment was to walk down the street and buy a damn pregnancy test that might change the course of the rest of her life.

  And so she said yes to Stephanie’s very kind offer. And then, after fumbling a twenty out of her wallet, she sat at her desk as her friend took off for the street as fast as her four-inch heels could carry her.

  Desi didn’t know how long Stephanie was gone, but she knew she didn’t move, didn’t think, barely even breathed in the time between when her friend left and when she returned, a small brown paper bag in her hand. How could Desi move when it felt as if her whole life hung in the balance?

  “Go do it now,” Stephanie urged as she handed over the bag. “It’s better to know than not know.”

  Desi agreed, which was how she found herself alone in a bathroom stall, peeing on a small white stick. According to the directions, there’d be one line no matter what—pregnant or not pregnant. But if she was pregnant…

  Except, she didn’t have to wait five minutes. She didn’t even have to wait one. By the time she had pulled her pants back up, there were two purple lines. Two very distinct purple lines.

  She was pregnant with Nic Durand’s baby, and she didn’t have a clue what she was supposed to do about it.

  Six

  “Nic, there’s a reporter on line two for you,” his secretary
said from where she was standing in the doorway to his office. “A Darlene Bloomburg from the Los Angeles Times.”

  He didn’t bother glancing up from his laptop, where he was reviewing his marketing team’s suggestions for Bijoux’s winter ad campaigns. It was only July, but he wanted to ensure they made a huge splash with the holiday crowd. It was the next step in his plan to make Bijoux diamonds a household name. “Pass her over to Ollie,” he suggested, referring to the head of Bijoux’s public relations department. “She can get whatever she needs from him.”

  “I tried that,” Katrina told him. “But she’s determined to talk to you.”

  Something about the urgency in her voice snagged his attention, had him looking up from the proposed ad campaign and trying to figure out what he was missing. His secretary was a thirty-year veteran in her field, and totally unflappable most days, so the fact that she was standing in front of him, wringing her hands and biting her lip, didn’t bode well for any of them.

  “Is there something going on that I should know about?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But I looked her up when she was so insistent, and she’s the managing editor for the Times. Not the typical reporter we get calling us for a quote or some information on the diamond business.”

  “You think she’s fact-checking an article about Bijoux?”

  She nodded nervously. “I think she might be, yes.”

  “How come I didn’t know the West Coast’s largest paper was writing an article about us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’m going to find out. Tell the reporter—what’s her name?”

  “Darlene Bloomburg, sir.”

  “Tell Bloomburg that I’ll be with her in a couple minutes. In the meantime, get Ollie in here, will you, please?”

  “Right away, Nic.”

  Less than two minutes later, his PR director walked through the door, looking calm and collected despite the fact that he’d hightailed it over here from the other end of the floor.

  “You know anything about this story?” Nic asked the other man.

  Ollie shook his head. “No, nothing. But I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. Probably just a puff piece. We are in the middle of wedding season, after all.”

  “Maybe.” But something felt off to Nic about that answer. Managing editors didn’t usually need to fact-check fluff pieces. They had copy editors for stuff like that. “Let’s just find out, shall we?” He reached for the phone and put it on speaker.

  “This is Nic Durand.”

  “Hello, Mr. Durand. My name is Darlene Bloomburg and I’m managing editor of the Los Angeles Times.”

  “Please, call me Nic. It’s nice to meet you, Darlene. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m calling because we’ll be running an article about Bijoux on the front page of Friday’s edition and I wanted to check some facts as well as give you a chance to make a statement about the article’s claims.”

  An alarm bell went off in his head and his eyes shot to Ollie, who looked as clueless as Nic felt. “You want me to make a statement.”

  “If you’d like to, yes.”

  “About what, may I ask?”

  “About the fact that the Times has uncovered some credible information that proves Bijoux has been passing off conflict diamonds as conflict-free ones for several years.”

  The single alarm bell turned into a full-fledged five-alarm brigade. “That’s impossible,” he said. “What’s your source?” Beside him, Ollie started turning red and making a stop gesture with his hands. Nic ignored him as the top of his own head threatened to blow off.

  “What’s impossible? That we’ve uncovered the evidence or—”

  “That you think you can prove such a thing when it is blatantly untrue. I’m going to ask you again. What’s your source?”

  “It’s the policy of the Times to never reveal a source. Am I correct in understanding that you dispute our findings, then?”

  “Damn right I dispute them. Bijoux deals only in conflict-free diamonds and has for the ten years that Marc Durand and I have been in charge of this company. And it’s Bijoux’s policy to sue anyone who commits libel by printing otherwise.”

  “I see. Do you have any proof to back up your claims that your diamonds are conflict-free?”

  “Are you serious with this? You’re the one accusing me of lying and cheating and, more importantly, of buying diamonds from countries that allow the enslavement and murder of children as long as it results in gems for them to sell. I feel like you’re the one who needs to provide the proof in this situation.”

  Next to him, Ollie changed from red to a very unbecoming shade of purple even as he waved his arms as if he was trying to attract the attention of a rescue plane. More to prevent his top PR guy from having a stroke in the middle of what promised to be the mother of all PR crises than because Nic wanted his help at that moment, Nic hit Mute on the phone and then asked, “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to get the article,” Ollie demanded. “There’s no way they run that article without you seeing it first. Tell her—”

  “I know what to tell her. You go get Hollister.” He wanted Bijoux’s head counsel in here, stat.

  Nic unmuted the phone, this time hitting the button so hard that the entire device skidded a foot across his desk. Son of a bitch. He was going to get that article and then he was going to tear it—and the reporter who wrote it—apart with his bare hands. “I need to tell you, Darlene, that if you run that article as is, without giving me a chance to vet it first and debunk your obvious misinformation, you will be facing a lawsuit the likes of which the Los Angeles Times has never seen.”

  “Our information is good.”

  “Your information is wrong, that much I guarantee you.”

  “It comes from an insider at Bijoux. One who has proof that the company has systematically bought conflict diamonds and passed them off as conflict-free diamonds for at least seven of the last ten years.”

  “Let me get this straight. You’re claiming that one of my people came to you and gave you information implicating us in not only buying conflict diamonds but then in conspiring to defraud consumers by claiming the gems are conflict-free.”

  “Essentially, yes, that is what the source has provided us proof of.”

  “And again, this came from one of our people?”

  “That is correct.”

  “And you think you’re going to run this article in three days.”

  “We are going to run this article in three days,”

  Over his dead body they were. “Yeah, well, Darlene, that just isn’t going to happen.”

  “With all due respect, Nic—”

  “With all due respect, Darlene, you’ve been taken for a ride.”

  “The Los Angeles Times does not get taken for a ride, Mr. Durand. We triple-check our sources—”

  “Well, you didn’t in this case. This is the first time either Marc or myself has heard of these allegations, and in a situation like this, no one else is in a position to know more about our diamonds, and where they come from, than we do. I know where every single shipment comes from. Marc personally inspects every mine on a regular basis. The certification numbers on the stones come straight to us, and only our in-house diamond experts ever get near those numbers. All of our diamonds are conflict-free. All of them. Now, you are welcome to come in and tour our facilities and see all of the safeguards we have in place to ensure that what you’re accusing us of doesn’t happen. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to courier over all of our PR materials so you can see where our diamonds really do come from.”

  “Our reporter tried to come for a tour on two separate occasions while she was researching this article. Both times she was turned away by your PR office.”

 
He ground his teeth together, wondering what the hell Ollie had been thinking. Probably that he didn’t have time to babysit a reporter on a puff piece, what with the sudden uptick in business and philanthropy—and the publicity both generated. But if she had told him what the story was about, there was no way Ollie would have turned her away. And no way this information wouldn’t have been brought to Nic’s attention a hell of a lot sooner than three days before the article was supposed to run.

  Which, he figured, was exactly why the reporter hadn’t told anyone the nature of the story she was writing. And now they were all paying for it…

  “Your reporter’s inability to explain her article idea to my PR department is not my fault.”

  “Of course not. But your PR department’s secrecy and inability to deal with the community when necessary is not our fault, either.”

  He ground his teeth, counted to ten to keep from spewing onto her all the vitriol that was racing through his brain. When he could finally speak again without fear of telling the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times to go to hell and take her newspaper with her, he said, “I’ll courier over that information to you right away. In the meantime, you can email or fax a copy of that article to my office.”

  “We are under no obligation to do so, Mr. Durand.” Her voice was firm, with absolutely no uncertainty whatsoever. Which seemed impossible to him considering the claims she was making—and the proof he had to refute them.

  Who was her source? he wondered again. He went through a list of all the employees who had left recently and couldn’t think of one who would do this—or who could do this. All of them had left on good terms, and not one of them had access to the kind of information that would convince the Times to run such a negative story. Largely because that information didn’t exist, but still. If it did, no way any of them would have been able to access it.