“I thought you could use some company,” he said. “And I was sure I could use a drink.”
“What if Danny was here?”
Ryan sat down in my egg chair. “Danny is not coming back here. Tonight took care of that.”
“Please get out of my chair.”
Ryan moved toward the couch. “So Meredith’s a wreck, but after I sent her back to Scarsdale in an Uber, I was able to go back in and calm everybody down. And it actually worked. I mean, Danny helped a lot, I’ve got to say. Did you propose the idea of that speech?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m impressed. Didn’t think he had it in him.”
“I don’t want to talk about Danny.”
“Do you think I want to talk about Danny?”
I sat down in my chair, weary and miserable. I wanted Ryan to go, but I was too exhausted to press it.
“Point is, after a little finagling and hand-holding, I got everyone buying that it was a misunderstanding. I even suggested that Meredith was actually angry about something else.”
“What’d that be?”
Ryan poured some scotch into a glass. “A woman friend I made upstate.”
“Thanks for taking that hit,” I said.
“The little hacker fucker is a pain in my ass.”
I walked to the cabinet, grabbed a glass, and poured myself a scotch as well. “What are we going to do about the website?”
He took a long pull from his glass. “I was hoping you didn’t see that.”
Then he shrugged.
“Well,” he said, “the stuff with your past, I think I can finagle.”
I met his eyes. “Seriously?”
“Who can’t relate to someone pretending to be something they’re not in order to please other people? It will make A Little Sunshine even more popular. Every girl who ever lied about her age on OKCupid will be rooting for you.”
“People don’t like a fraud.”
“Everyone is a fraud, Sunshine. Everyone with an Instagram page, a Facebook account. And certainly everyone with a cooking show. How many of these folks are cooking for themselves, really? They’re figureheads. All of them. That test kitchen at Cook TV? It’s never busy with the real people. It’s their cronies. Other people making the recipes. And don’t get me started on the Food Network.”
“Think we went a step beyond that, Ryan.”
He waved me off. “Tomato, tomahto! We sell an image of the person in front of the camera. And that’s the job. To be the perfect image. You did the job and did it beautifully. So now we just have to change the image.”
“To what?”
“Learning, getting real, for real. Self-embrace. It’s the latest thing. And it doesn’t matter how big the lies are. People forget. They always forget the details.”
“It’s the internet, Ryan. Naked pictures aren’t quickly forgotten.”
“Craig’s pulled them, my lawyers are all over it, that part is handled. And Meredith will calm down and handle the rest. She wouldn’t want to put her children in that position. Outing their father, as it were.”
I didn’t know if it was the scotch, but I started to think that it could actually work. “So . . . it’s your plan to ignore the lies?”