by JA Huss
Connor’s father stands at the microphone. He’s wearing a tux, like everyone else but Connor. I imagine the conversation that went along with that choice. (“Can’t be in a tux when you announce your candidacy for office. Looks too pretentious. Very one percent. And that’s something we need to avoid, son.”)
He taps the microphone. “Is this thing on?” he jokes.
That man shot me. Shot. Me. Because I saw something I shouldn’t have. And if Sofia and Camille weren’t there with me, if I wasn’t with them at the time, if Bennett and Emily and Hayes didn’t see it too, he’d have killed me.
You fucked up that night. You fucked up and instead of owning up to what you did, you ruined us. Turned that whole year into a lie. But you can’t kill all of us, can you, Mr. Arlington?
Not true. He could still kill all of us if we don’t do this right. Even Connor. Especially Connor.
“I want to say thank you for coming to celebrate what is probably the happiest day of my life.” Mr. Arlington turns to look at his son. Connor is pale. Hands clasped in front of him. Flanked on either side by that campaign guy, Steven, and…
“Holy shit,” Sofia whispers. “Louise did not age well.”
“That can’t be Louise,” I say. “She’s so… old.”
“She was always old, you guys,” Hayes says. “We just saw her wrong because of the drugs. She wasn’t a student with us, she’s a crazy fucking psychiatrist sent in to reprogram us.”
I don’t like that word. Reprogram. Especially when I’m looking at Connor and it’s so clear. So very crystal clear that they’ve given him drugs tonight.
What if he doesn’t remember me? What if he still believes what they made us think?
Or worse. What if he knows? What if he knows the truth and doesn’t choose me?
“I need him to see me,” I say, moving forward, but Hayes pulls me back.
“Not yet,” he whispers. “Stay still, Kiera. He needs to make a decision. For once in his life, Connor Arlington needs to be the one to decide his own fate.”
“My son,” the Arlington patriarch continues, “has an announcement to make tonight. Something I’ve been hoping for. Something we’ve both been working towards for the better part of the last decade. So let’s give it up for the man of the hour!”
People clap and cheer. It’s a political event so there’s red, white, and blue banners with the Arlington name on them that get waves. Looking up, I see a net filled with balloons. Not lavender—was that even real? Was any of it real?—but also red, white, and blue. Ready to be released after he makes his candidacy official.
“Good evening,” Connor says into the microphone. More cheering from his father’s loyal supporters. The whole thing is ridiculous. Everything has been planned and plotted. Set up for who knows how long. More than a decade, I’m sure. For whatever reason, Connor was the chosen one in this family and this night is just the first of many if he goes through with this. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you all for coming.”
He’s holding some papers. His speech, I realize. He’s gonna do it. He’s gonna read that speech. One he didn’t write, I know that for sure. He’s gonna say those words, and make this real, and—
But then he puts them aside.
I look at his father, pursing his lips. He leans in and whispers something but Connor puts up a hand.
The crowd begins to murmur things. Things I’m thinking too. “What’s he doing?” “What was that?” “What’s going on?”
Connor searches the crowd and people start looking around. His father finds me first and just as he opens his mouth—most likely to call for security—Connor says, “There you are, Kiera.”
He’s slurring his words a little and I feel sick all of a sudden. Sick that he’s going to say something wrong. Something that will rip his life apart and take me out at the same time.
“Come up here,” he says.
And then the crowd parts, and the whispers are louder now. “Who’s that?” “Who’s she?” “What’s happening?” There’s a direct lane of empty space between me and the podium where Connor stands.
Hayes leans into me, pulling the book out of my purse and placing it in my hands. “You know what to do,” he says.
I do.
No matter what Connor’s choice is. No matter who he chooses. I have a mission here. A mission to expose them.
“Come on,” Connor says, motioning to me with his fingers in a way that conveys power. A way that let’s everyone know he’s in control. A way that makes me nervous.
How much does he know?
But there’s no more time because my feet are moving forward and soon I’m at the podium, looking up at him.
“I have a choice to make tonight. You see… I love this woman.”
Gasps from the crowd.
“Connor,” his father says sharply. And even though he’s whispering, I’m close enough to hear him now. “Stop it right—”
“Her name is Kiera Bonnaire. And she writes erotica.”
I suck in a deep, deep breath. A few people laugh loudly. Several close to me snicker.
“Come here,” Connor whispers, holding out his hand. “Come up and stand beside me.”
I search for the stairs that will take me up to him, but several men are blocking my way. Telling me in no uncertain terms that this is not gonna happen.
Connor turns to his father and says, right into the microphone, “She wrote a book called The Dirty Ones. It’s sitting on the New York Times bestseller list right now at number three.”
Loud gasps. No one is bothering to whisper anymore.
“And she made a promise when she wrote that book. Just one. She promised that the story was true.”
“Connor,” his father says, loud now. “Stop. Right now. You have no idea—”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” Connor says, looking me straight in the eyes. “And you can stop her from joining me if you want, but this announcement will be made.”
“What is it?” someone calls. “What’s the announcement? Are you running for Senate?”
It’s someone from the media, I realize.
“No,” Connor says. “No, I’m not running for Senate. Because I’ve been told by my father since I was a child that to be in politics you have be a role model. Which is absurd, when you think about it. So a life with an erotica author isn’t something I could have. Wasn’t something I could keep. Was something I’d have to give up. Or at least,” Connor says, looking at his father again, “keep it a secret, right, Dad?”
His father goes pale.
He knows.
Connor knows, and Christopher knows, and I know and now the whole world is gonna know too.
“The way my father kept his affairs secret.”
It’s almost impossible to hear him now. The room has erupted in a cacophony of talking. The media are yelling questions.
“But one of my dear friends told me something the other day. He said, ‘She deserves better than that.’ And he’s right. She does. So I’m telling you now, I’m in love with this woman. She writes dirty, filthy, dark erotica. And she’s damn good at it too.”
I can’t help it. I smile.
“Because she wrote that book right there and every word is true. And not everyone can take a true story and weave it into a tale.”
“That book can’t be true,” someone calls out from the crowd. “That book says—”
“That book says,” Connor interrupts, “that my father had an affair, got caught by a group of college kids and his wife, then killed a man, shot Kiera Bonnaire in the shoulder, and hired psychiatrist Dr. Louise Livingston to drug us all up, week after week, month after month, and feed us a fake story to cover it up. She bullied us. She made us perform sexual acts with each other. She pumped us with drugs, and fake stories, and then—to make it feel as real as it possibly could—she made Kiera write it down.” He stops to point to the book in my hand. “That was not this book. That book is in the room behind me. This book,”
he says, “is the true story of us. The Dirty Ones.”
“Lies,” Christopher Arlington sneers. “That’s all lies!”
“No!”
Every head turns to see Emily coming up behind Connor. Holding my book. The other book. The one with the Great Gatsby cover I didn’t think was real.
“I was there! I’m a Dirty One and none of this is lies. This is the book Kiera wrote ten years ago after he blamed me for shooting her and had me locked up in a mental hospital for attempted murder.”
“Ridiculous!” Christopher barks. “Cut the cameras! This press conference is over!”
No one cuts off a camera.
“I was there too,” Sofia says in her soft, gentle Sofia voice as she steps forward. “I’m a Dirty One. My initials are in that book. SA. Sofia Astor. He did this to me as well.”
“I’m a Dirty One too,” Hayes says. “HF. Hayes Fitzgerald. He fucked me over pretty good as well.”
“But,” Connor continues, still speaking into the mic even though it was turned off. Doesn’t matter. He projects his voice through the whole room. “There’s more. CD is Camille DuPont and BW is Bennett Winthrop. You might recognize their names from the news yesterday after they”—Connor makes air quotes—“‘killed themselves.’” He shakes his head. “They didn’t kill themselves. I don’t know what happened to them, but I suspect you’ll find drugs were involved and they will trace back to—”
“How dare you!” Louise spits. “How dare you say these things in my home!”
“How dare you,” Connor spits back. “How dare you fuck with the minds of innocent kids. How dare you erase me and my friends. How dare you lock up Emily Medici in a mental hospital because she refused to believe your lies! How dare you, Dr. Louise Livingston,” he seethes. “How dare you rewrite our story.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - CONNOR
You are not allowed to steal words from people.
You’re not even allowed to borrow them without permission.
What they did to Kiera—what my father did, what Louise did… it makes me sick.
And I was the reader. They made her write those words and made me tell the story. Week after week. Month after month. That dark, sick, twisted tale of sexual perversion was woven into our minds with equal parts masterful manipulation and mind-altering drugs.
For what?
To save himself from a second-degree murder trial? That he would probably just buy his way out of?
They fucked with our heads. Made us believe things we never did. I don’t even know which parts are real and which parts are fiction. Did they have an anniversary party with balloons and butterflies? Did we meet up in person as a whole group? Or in pairs? Was Kiera really at every single session?
“My friends are dead,” I tell the crowd, not done yet. So not done yet. “My friends are dead, Emily was locked up in a hospital, and every one of us had our words stolen. But they also stole an entire year of our lives. They ripped our reality apart and replaced it with something ugly, and disgusting, and sick.”
I stop and look out at the silent, stunned crowd.
“You came here for an announcement? There it is. The truth.”
“Why should we believe you?” a reporter asks.
“You don’t have to believe me,” I say. “I didn’t make this little speech for you. I made it for them.” I point to Kiera, and Sofia, and Hayes. Emily is close to me now, so I grab her hand and hold it up. “I made it for us. What happens next doesn’t matter. I did this for us. We are the Dirty Ones and this is our story.”
I walk around the podium, jump down from the stage, and extend my hand to Emily. I grab her by the waist and lift her to the floor, keeping her hand, so she knows who I am in this moment—her friend—and walk towards Kiera. I take her hand, she takes Sofia’s hand, Sofia takes Hayes’ hand.
And we leave. Together.
Minus two.
Because we came back from this sick, grand delusion one day too late.
And we just gotta learn to live with that.
CHAPTER THIRTY - KIERA
Louise Livingston was arrested the day of Camille’s funeral. Bennett had been put to rest the day before, and when Connor, Hayes, Sofia and I walked back through the door of Sofia’s apartment we thought we’d run out of tears for Camille. That’s how hard we cried.
It’s funny how these two were so much a part of me, then they weren’t, then they were again. Funny how I can feel so empty for one man I hadn’t talked to for ten years less than a week ago.
Even Hayes cried for Bennett. It was a silent cry. No sobbing or hysterics. Just… overwhelming sadness.
Connor really did lose his best friend. Bennett was the only kid he’d grown up with since he was small. The only kid he shared all the success and failures with.
I’m not sure if I cried harder for Bennett dying or that little piece of Connor’s heart that went dim that day because it was empty.
I just know I cried so hard I couldn’t open my eyes when we got home.
The guys got drunk. Sofia and I crawled into her bed and held each other all night. And when we woke in the morning, just when we thought we’d get to start a new day, we did the whole thing all over again.
Only this time it was Sofia falling apart. This time it was Sofia saying goodbye to her best friend.
And guess what?
It turns out you can’t run out of tears.
But Connor saved us that night. He opened up one of Camille’s stupid erotic comedies and read it out loud.
The entire book. Cover to cover. Every single page, even the note at the end. We streamed it live for her fans and they watched by the millions.
So hard.
They loved her so hard.
We cried with them until we laughed. And then we cried some more when her characters got their HEA.
Because we were one day too late.
One day.
And Camille DuPont would never, ever get another chance at happily ever after.
It took another seven days for Steven what’s-his-face to be arrested as an accomplice. There was a whole slew of charges. Too many for me to list now. Then every day after that for almost a week, there was another arrest. More people. Even Connor’s mother.
Hell, if my mother was alive, she’d have been arrested too.
But it took another three full weeks before Christopher Arlington was finally led out of the front door to his North Shore estate in handcuffs and put in the back seat of a police car. Helicopters circled overhead, catching it on film.
For Connor, it was another funeral. Another loss.
None of us cheered.
It’s taken months for me to unravel the long process of how this book came to be written in my voice. By my hands.
It was me. But not just me.
Because it was Hayes Fitzgerald who started unraveling this tightly wound secret.
Several years ago he got in his helicopter with a drunken directive for the pilot to take him to Essex College for the annual legacy dinner. He says now he can’t explain how it all came apart in his head. Maybe it was the alcohol or the drugs that allowed the memories to come pouring out of the broken dam. Or maybe the brainwashing was just wearing off.
All he knew at the time was that he was broken. Shattered into millions of pieces. That he spent all those years that came after graduation in a drug- and alcohol-induced stupor.
Not because he was an addict, but because he was afraid. Scared to death of the secrets locked inside his head. Terrified that one day they’d come spilling out of that cobbled-together dam and he’d go insane, just like Emily.
But as is the case with most fears, once you face them they lose power. They make you stronger.
He came to me next. Under the pretense of meeting for lunch with an old friend, he took me out and we met up with his therapist. A nobody psychiatrist working out of an office in the worst part of Burlington who mostly took pro bono cases but had an online website offering hypnotic therapy f
or recovering lost memories. She had teased most of what really happened that night out of Hayes before he brought me in, but he needed me to get the whole story.
Or so he thought.
There was no tower. Almost everything we thought was true was just lies.
I wasn’t taken to the hospital after I was shot, I was taken to the Essex College Student Health Center that night. Stitched up, good as new, and then all seven of us were locked in a room on the second floor of the theatre building to “get our story straight.”
Emily was combative and Hayes, like the knight in shining armor who grew up in a castle of a mansion, came to her defense. Hayes Fitzgerald is just not a guy who goes along. He’s a fighter. So they blamed my gunshot wound on Emily to get rid of her. This weird girl who everyone already thought was crazy, just went crazy. And they used her to threaten the rest of us.
See what happens when you don’t go along, children? You get the Emily treatment.
Louise Livingston was there to help us. With drugs. With her own twisted version of hypnotic therapy. Though she wasn’t in the business of recovering them, she was in the business of planting them.
And plant them she did.
She has never explained it. What I know of what happened is just a whole bunch of mis-matched memories. But it’s all there in the new book and I’ve read it over and over again, trying to make the pieces fit together the best way I know how.
The most tragic thing about this whole nightmare might be that if we had just read a little further that night Hayes locked us in the third-floor library we’d have gotten to the truth before morning. The beginning of the book was what we thought happened. But the truth—the real events of that night—came in the next chapter. If Connor had just read that part about me getting shot the whole truth would’ve unfolded. We’d have figured out it was all lies and Bennett and Camille would’ve never have left.
Bennett and Camille would still be alive.
Hayes blames himself for not being more forthcoming.
But it’s not his fault. No one should feel guilt and shame for trying to be careful with the people they love.