else?”
Cait shook her head. There was no point in scaring the poor woman. So she didn’t mention the brick somebody had thrown through her windshield, as technically, that hadn’t happened during a drive. A technicality, maybe, but an important one.
“Did the woman go back to him?”
“The boyfriend?” Cait shrugged. “I don’t know. I tried to tell her that we could provide her with other services, that our help wouldn’t just end once the procedure was finished, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to talk at all, actually—as soon as she was in the car and away from that house, she closed her eyes and slept all the way to Albuquerque. I don’t know if she was faking it or if she really was that exhausted.” Cait thought about it for a minute. “Probably both.”
“So you dropped her off back at the house when it was finished?”
Cait heard the implied criticism and felt a flash of irritation. “We’re here to help as much as we can, but we’re also here to do what the client tells us. She told me to drop her back at the house, so that’s what I did.” I did my job, she added silently. Just like I’m doing now.
“Was the boyfriend waiting for her?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see him. I waited at the curb for a few minutes after she went inside, just in case, but . . .” She shrugged again. “Nothing.”
She could still remember the feeling of powerlessness as she’d watched the woman walk up the drive, the gentle slope of her shoulders signaling nothing but resignation. Cait had wanted to jump out of the Jeep and grab her and shake her. Instead, she just watched her disappear into the darkened house, and after sitting outside for ten minutes, she’d driven back to Austin and spent the evening sinking beers and trying to forget.
It was a feeling she was all too familiar with.
Nine Months Earlier
It was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek personal essay: nothing more. It was a little clickbaity, maybe, but that’s how Internet journalism worked. You wrote a piece about something, your editor stuck a controversial headline on it, and you got eyeballs. Eyeballs meant advertiser money, and advertiser money meant the website could pay their writers. Not much, obviously. Five hundred dollars was the most she’d ever gotten for a story, and that was a spon-con thing for a hotel chain. The stuff she’d cared about got much less—sometimes nothing.
She got a hundred dollars for this one.
She typed up the story as soon as the Lyft dropped her back at her apartment, the alcohol wearing off after a strong cup of coffee, leaving her buzzing and jittery. She wrote the whole thing in an hour and sent it to her editor—well, the woman she hoped would be her editor—at a website that specialized in confessional essays and gossip.
“Thought you’d like this,” she wrote, and after she hit send, she took a long, hot shower and went to bed.
She didn’t have high hopes for it—Jake was well known in Austin, but he was only starting to break out nationally, and country music was generally considered pretty niche. But the timing worked in her favor, and editors were clamoring for Me Too content, especially when it involved a famous (or even semi-famous) man and salacious sexual details.
In the morning, there was an email waiting in her inbox: “Loved this,” the editor wrote, “but I think we should publish anonymously. I spoke to our legal team and we can’t cover your liability. We’ll pay you two hundred for your trouble. Sound okay?” She said it would go live later that day.
Cait was a little bummed that she wouldn’t get the byline, but she was still getting paid to be published, so she took herself for fancy coffee to celebrate. She sat in the café texting Alyssa and swapping stories with her about their night. Alyssa had ended up ditching the tech bro at Cedar Street and then gotten in a limo with a bunch of Israelis who were about to ship back to their home country and start their stints in the national army. “Those guys can really party,” Alyssa typed, along with a long string of emojis. “What happened to you?” she added. “You disappeared! *poof of smoke emoji*”
Cait filled Alyssa in on the details of her evening and told her to look out for the article later that day. At two p.m., the piece went live