Page 55 of The One Decent Thing

“Yeah.” I swallowed back bile. “I expected this. I was trying not to think about it.”

The screen dimmed and switched to the missed call notifications. It’d gone to voicemail. For a brief second, relief flooded through me, and then the phone instantly lit up with another call.

“Might as well get it over with.” Aidan kissed the side of my head and wrapped his arm around my waist. “Or you could block their number and forget about it.”

Tempting, but that would never work. I’d never be ready for this, and putting it off would only ratchet up my anxiety over it to such a degree that I’d end up hospitalized. Again. That was two days of my life I never wanted to repeat, IV fluids for dehydration and my uncle having to fly in from Nice to reassure the doctors that no, they did not need to call my parents, and yes, I was nineteen and in college and had every right to choose my own emergency contacts.

I pressed the green button to accept the call and put it up to my ear. “You’re going to call that little bitch and retract every word,” my mother hissed, her voice thick with rage. “You’re going to apologize. And then you’re going to stand next to me at every campaign event and smile for the cameras, or I’m going to ruin you. You and that piece of trash ex-con you brought home to —”

“Or what?” I was shaking, but it was a distant thing. Like something happening to someone else. I was so far beyond freaking out, it didn’t even register. She could threaten me, she could even threaten Nissa, who I was pretty sure could take care of her damn self. But Aidan? No, no, hell no. “You can’t do anything to us.”

“I can make sure you never see a penny of your trust fund when you turn twenty-five, and you can see how depending on my piece of shit half-brother works out for you. I can have that worthless bastard you’re spreading your legs for locked up for the rest of his life. You have no idea what I can do to you, Sebastian.” Her voice had gone low, to a poisonous pitch that sent cold, helpless shudders down my spine. When she’d said my name like that when I was a kid, I’d always started crying. That only made her madder. “You’re going topayfor this.”

Aidan was stiff as a board against my side, and I realized he’d been close enough to hear every word. I turned my head. His lips were pressed together tightly, but he was gazing at me steadily, without a trace of fear. “You got this,” he mouthed, the softest possible whisper. My mother was still going on, listing all the ways she’d destroy my life: telling the university I was unstable and a danger to my fellow students, threatening my professors’ research grant funding, getting Nissa fired and blacklisted from every media outlet in the country.

With Aidan’s arm around me and his bright amber eyes fixed on me, it was just white noise. Meaningless. Like the faint buzz of cosmic microwave background radiation playing through cheap speakers.

“None of that’s going to happen,” I said, interrupting her in the middle of a sentence. About something — it didn’t matter what she was saying. “You can’t do any of that. Not now that everyone knows who you really are.” She started trying to yell over me, but I went on, more loudly. “You can’t do anything to me! Or Aidan. Or Nissa. Or my professors, for God’s sake. And Uncle Peter has better estate lawyers than you!”

I yanked the phone away from my ear before my eardrum disintegrated from the screams of fury shooting out of it. For a second, I stared down at the screen in shock. I hadn’t known I had it in me.

Aidan reached out, poked the end button with a finger, and pulled the phone out of my nerveless hand. He held down the power button and then dropped it to the quilt with a soft thump.

“You weren’t going to get a better closing line than that,” he said. “That was — Sebastian, you’re incredible.”

I leaned into him, knowing he’d wrap me up in a hug and hold me tight. He did, without hesitation. “Maybe I’m getting less pathetic.”

Aidan nuzzled my ear. “You were never pathetic. For the record, though? ‘Uncle Peter has better estate lawyers than you’ might be the most trust-fund-brat thing anyone has ever said, ever. I mean, I guess if you’d managed to work in a reference to a yacht —”

I poked him in the side, and he chuckled and shut up. At least he thought he was funny.

Not that it wasn’t sort of true. I started to laugh too, although it came out almost more like a sob.

“Hey,” he said after a minute. “I was going to send Nissa some flowers. You want to find some breakfast and pick something out for her? I don’t think I can go back to sleep.”

So that was what we did. Breakfast was delicious, even though Aidan burned the bacon and I burned the scrambled eggs. Over coffee, we picked the biggest bouquet we could find and had it delivered.

My mom could go suck it.

Aidan

Sebastian turned his phone back on after breakfast, reasoning that Nissa might call, or maybe someone else he needed to talk to. He did take my advice to block all the numbers his parents might call from. Five minutes later, it rang: his uncle.

“He never calls me,” Sebastian said, and picked it up.

Curious as I was, I headed out to the patio to give them some family privacy. If Uncle Peter had thought Sebastian’s interview was important enough for him to interrupt his busy schedule of womanizing and lighting joints with hundred-dollar bills, then hey, I’d let him talk to his nephew in peace.

Not to mention, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what Sebastian was going to tell him about me — and I also wasn’t sure Sebastian would be honest with me in the room.

I’d just finished my cigarette and was contemplating another when Sebastian stepped out the back door, off the phone already.

“Put some shoes on, it’s wet and cold out here,” I told him.

Sebastian glanced down meaningfully at my bare feet, and then back up again. I shrugged. “My feet can take it.”

“Oh my God, you’re such a tough guy,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Come back inside already. Nissa texted me. You need to come check out all the comments on the online version of her article.”

I followed him in. “Did your mom call Peter?”

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