No One But Us

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  “And here I was thinking the worst case was divided public opinion.”

  James’ parents released the voicemails late yesterday afternoon, saying we needed to be sure we’d shut Edward down before he could put another alternate version of the truth out there. I spoke off the record to The New York Times. My name won’t be mentioned, but it still seems to me that this could backfire.

  James reaches over to the nightstand and grabs his laptop. I wait, my heart pounding so hard that I swear I can feel it echo. As he pulls the article up, I feel increasingly convinced that this is going to go as badly for me as pretty much everything else has this summer.

  He scans the article briefly before he slides the laptop over with a small smile.

  I read and begin to relax. She’s relayed the story like I did, following chronologically a little girl who believes herself surrounded by trustworthy adults, who continues to believe it long after it ceases to be true. And she then describes a system in which celebrities evade restraining orders and a whole network conspires to keep their big money-maker free from harm.

  It doesn’t just skewer Edward—it takes down the whole show, the network, even the justice system for failing to protect a citizen when there’s a celebrity involved.

  If anything, Edward is almost unfairly vilified; he sounds like a pedophile who’s been targeting me since childhood.

  Tears well up in my eyes as I finish the article.

  “Why are you crying?” James asks, mystified.

  “I don’t know.” I laugh. “It’s just… I’d stopped believing things would ever be fair, that any part of the system still worked. And I’m so happy it does.”

  Max makes us all breakfast, and we wait impatiently for the voicemails to air on morning TV. The anchors repeatedly promise the segment is “coming up” and instead present us with hard-hitting features about a Jurassic Park-themed wedding, an 80 year old completing her high school degree, and a fashion show with babies dressing up like historic figures.

  Finally the female anchor does a live intro, putting on her Very Serious Face to let viewers know this is important. “Last June, rumors began to swirl about Edward Ferris,” she intones. “He was accused of having an affair with a 19-year-old intern. In truth, the affair was merely a figment of his imagination. And at its center, a teenage girl he harassed and stalked to the point that she feared for her life. What you’re about to hear next may shock you.”

  I snort a laugh at this. “Personally, I’m shocked to hear that I feared for my life.”

  Then the voicemails begin playing, the words transcribed on the screen in case anyone has missed a single crazy-on-top-of-crazy word.

  I wish I hadn’t had to release them. It was necessary, but I could do without having the whole world know the things he thought about, even if most people don’t know they were about me.

  “Jesus. I can’t believe he was saying that shit to you,” says Ginny quietly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I raise a brow, and she nods. “I guess I wouldn’t have told me either.” She pushes James’ arm off me and puts hers in its place.

  “That guy is so fucked,” says Max.

  I wish that were true, but I’m not sure. Celebrities have come back from worse.

  It’s announced that afternoon that Edward will take a “leave of absence” to deal with “addiction issues.” My guess is that they’ll wait to see if he can recover from the bad publicity, and it’s entirely possible he will. But all that matters is I will too.

  Chapter 58

  ELLE

  By midday, every network except Edward’s seems to be discussing him around the clock. Then it’s a running gag on the late night shows. One comedian does an entire skit dressed as Edward, pretending to hang outside a high school and ask girls to prom in his gravelly voice.

  Edward might have stood a chance at recovering from the whole thing if he’d followed the advice given to me—if he’d laid low, waited for it to die down. But instead he insists he is coming into work, and he has to be removed from the building by security. And then he stands in front and announces to all the camera crews outside that he never left those voicemails—not the best argument to make when the entire country recognizes your voice.

  So it seems safe to conclude that my gamble paid off, but there’s one last hurdle to deal with: my father. No news has been released about his correspondent’s position, and in this case, no news probably is not good news.

  I brace myself when he calls, for his anger and his threats. And possibly worse.

  “I read the article,” he says. His voice is stern, emotionless. A newscaster voice.

  I’m not going to apologize. His behavior this summer has shown me who he is. And if he refuses to pay for college now, he’ll just be confirming it.

  I’ll be okay I’ll be okay I’ll be okay. I’m not entirely sure I believe it, but I repeat it just the same.

  “Those voicemails. You should have told me,” he says, and there’s a tiny unevenness to his voice that I’ve never heard before. “How could you not have told me how bad it was?”

  For some reason this unexpected shift, him acting like a parent for the first time in months, or even years, makes my eyes sting.

  “I figured you knew,” I whisper.

  “People who knew him far better than I are shocked. How could I have known?”

  “I also didn’t really think you’d care,” I admit, and my voice begins to break.

  He pauses. “No matter what else is going on in my life,” he finally says, “you’re still my daughter, and I love you.”

  As it turns out, the network has given him his job back. This, more than anything else, probably explains his sudden change of attitude and the fact that he’s finally invited me to his wedding. He’s already sold the wedding photos to a tabloid, so I have a feeling this is going to be a part of his image-rehabilitation campaign, which I really want nothing to do with.

  Then again, by November, an all-expenses-paid trip to Grand Cayman with my boyfriend might be pretty appealing.

  It feels as if the world is finally beginning to shift the right way, that all the pieces are falling into place. Things looked so grim at the start of the summer—and they were grim—but I’d forgotten this: it only takes one bright thing to light up the darkness. And that thing, for me, was James. He more than makes up for anything I’ve lost.

  Chapter 59

  ELLE

  “You’re going to chicken out,” James tells Ginny, saying what all of us think but aren’t brave enough to speak aloud.

  She snorts. “You know a lot less than you think you do. I’m going upstairs to call him right now.”

  Ginny decided to break up with Alex weeks ago, after she cheated on him the second time, but insisted she couldn’t do it until he was back in the US.

  “You just can’t do that to someone,” she said, as if he was a soldier deployed to Afghanistan instead of a Princeton sophomore hanging out in Barcelona on his parents’ dime. I think we all assumed it was Step One of a strategy tentatively titled “Don’t Ever Break Up with Alex.”

  We wait, expecting her to come downstairs sheepish and excuse-laden. Instead she comes down enraged.

  “He’s an asshole,” she hisses.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask.

  “He cheated on me!” she shouts. “He cheated on me with some bitch from Stanford!”

  “Uh, Ginny, you cheated on him too,” I remind her.

  “Yeah, but he slept with her!” she shouts. “That’s different! And I asked him if he would have told me if I hadn’t broken up with him, and he said, ‘Probably not.’ He could have given me a disease!”

  “Uh, Ginny, you slept with someone else, too,” I say, trying not to laugh.

  Max steps forward with an odd, pinched look to his face. “You slept with someone?” he asks quietly.

  She puts her hands on her hips, suddenly defensive. “So?”

  “I can’t believe you’d do somethi
ng like that,” he says.

  For a moment I assume he must be joking. But his voice isn’t teasing. It’s rife with disappointment, like she cheated on him.

  She rounds on him. “Seriously? You, the biggest whore in the tri-state area, are acting disappointed in me?”

  “I thought you had more self-control than that,” he says coolly.

  “You spent the whole summer buying me sex toys and talking about how I needed to ‘bloom’ sexually!” she protests. “So what’s with the attitude?”

  “It was a joke! I didn’t think you were actually going to do it!” he seethes.

  She laughs. “How unbelievably sexist. Why would you hold me to a different standard than you hold yourself?”

  “Because I thought you were a better person than that!” he shouts. “I thought you were a better person than me.”

  He walks out the front door, slamming it so hard the windows shake.

  Ginny turns to us in shock. “What the hell is wrong with him? He never acts like that.”

  I remember the time James practically ran out of the kitchen after we first kissed, and I find myself smiling the same way Max did all summer every time James lost his shit.

  “Yes,” I reply. “Isn’t that interesting?”

  Chapter 60

  JAMES

  I told Ginny, after that phone call with my father weeks ago, that my suspicions about him and Kelly Evans were correct. I’d rather not have told her, except I know my sister. It wasn’t the kind of thing she was going to let go of without knowing for certain. She was angry, but she came to her senses eventually and recognized who should be held responsible.

  I wish to God I could say the same of my mother. She blamed Elle the night I went to Connecticut, and she continues to blame her to this day. I’m pretty sure she’s going to land herself in the hospital again. And when it happens, I’m going to feel terrible, but I’m not losing Elle because of the people my parents have become. They got to make their own choices at my age, and I deserve that much too.

  “What I don’t understand,” muses Elle one day, “is why you had to agree to law school in order for your parents to help me. You said yourself it was easy for them.”

  This is the point where I should tell her. If we stay together, and I’m 99.9 percent certain we will, I’ll eventually have to. But right now, with her eyes glittering in the sun and her wide mouth about to stretch into a smile, I cannot. She’s had so few truly carefree moments this summer. I want to give her just a few more, for as long as I can.

  Chapter 61

  ELLE

  Our last few days together are bittersweet. I’m as happy as I’ve ever been, as long as I can stave off the pressing sadness of leaving James. In spite of the fact that he’s deferred the FBI, he’s happy too. I’ve never seen him so relaxed.

  I feel it coming, though, our impending separation. It pops into our conversations with increasing frequency. And as much as the distance bothers him, James is far more troubled by the fact that Ryan will be at Cornell with me all year, while he is not.

  “You know he’s going to be writing you songs and shit,” James grouses one day, looking even more glum than his words indicate.

  “You act like he’s some kind of drug I can’t resist,” I tell him, plopping down onto his lap and kissing his neck. I press my thumb to the lines in his furrowed brow. “We’ll only be four hours apart. Besides, I have more to worry about with Allison than you do with Ryan.”

  “With Allison?” he says with a laugh. “Now you’re just making shit up.”

  “She’s evil,” I insist. “Like, soap-opera evil. I can totally see her drugging you and getting herself knocked up to trap you into marriage.”

  “Never,” he says. “I’m going to suffer through the next year and stay a million miles from her—”

  “And all other girls,” I interrupt.

  “And all other girls,” he continues. “And next summer we’ll come back here and laugh about the agony you put me through all summer.”

  “Agony I put you through?” I laugh. “What about my agony, Mr. ‘Elle is too young’?”

  He continues as if I haven’t spoken. “And since we’ll have the whole house to ourselves, you can spend months and months making it up to me.”

  He kisses me, and I think of all of my imagined futures, and his. The days and months and years each of us has spent working toward things that may no longer happen. But when James describes our future together, it doesn’t have the same ephemeral quality my other dreams had. It’s real, as solid as the memory of something I’ve already lived through, as palpable as the thing that’s tied me to him since I was child.

  “We’ll have to invite Max and Ginny,” I tease. “They’ll definitely be a couple by then.”

  He shudders. “You’re destroying my fantasy.”

  “I think maybe they’d be perfect together,” I argue.

  “I really need you to stop talking,” he insists.

  “But seriously, James, don’t you think—”

  His mouth closes over mine as he stands, scooping me up as he heads for his room.

  I grin. “What are you doing?”

  “Shutting you up before I require years of therapy,” he says. “You forced my hand.”

  “I’d apologize…” I sigh happily as the door shuts behind us. “But I’m not really sorry.”

  “Yes,” he says as he throws me on the bed and whips off his shirt. “I didn’t figure you were.”

  THE END

  Want More of Elle and James?

  Join my mailing list at www.elizabethoroark.com to get a glimpse of their lives in New York next year, as a pivotal decision about their future is made.

  Also by Elizabeth O’Roark

  Undertow

  Waking Olivia

  Drowning Erin

  About the Author

  I was the kid who brought a book to slumber parties, and I’m now the adult who goes on vacation and hides away reading for most of it.

  I’ve been known to read on my phone during meetings and parties, and if I’m really into a book (hello, Outlander), I will read it at stoplights all the way home.

  When not reading or writing, I’m with my three kids—Patrick, Lily and Jack—most likely looking for AA batteries for the Xbox remotes, or telling them to put away their devices…and pick up a book.

  I love hearing from readers. Visit me at www.elizabethoroark.com, or on Facebook at Elizabeth O’Roark Books .

  Acknowledgments

  First, a major thank you and hugs to the indie author community, whose support and generosity never ceases to amaze me.

  Next, to Melissa-Panio Peterson, who has been a godsend as I try to release this book and do all the other things I was supposed to be doing all along, and to Linda Russell for calmly pulling everything together.

  To my editor, Jessica Royer Ocken, for fixing everything without pulling my voice out of the mix, Becca Hensley Myoor for giving it some final tweaks and Kari March for another cover I adore.

  To my beta readers: Katie Foster Meyer, Brenna Rattai, Erin Thompson and Laura Ward Steuart.

  To Sallye, my travel buddy into perpetuity; Deanna, who I’m counting on to save me from the coming zombie apocalypse; and Katie, beta reader extraordinaire.

  To my family—Kate, Chris, Carol Ann and Chris #2—and of course, to Patrick, Lily and Jack, who I love more than Diet Mountain Dew and possibly as much as candy corn.